Klingbeil Wants Schnabel's Chair: Independent, but Preferably with a German Passport

The farewell has barely been announced and the "reserved" sign is already on the chair. Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil said on Friday, on the sidelines of the Eurogroup meeting in Luxembourg, that Germany wants to stay strongly represented in the European Central Bank's bodies and will put forward a German candidate, in close coordination with the Chancellery. The trigger: Isabel Schnabel leaves the ECB Executive Board on 3 January 2027 and from 4 January will run the IMF's Monetary and Capital Markets Department. Her term would normally have run until the end of 2027.

There is a second message. Observers read the move as a sign that Berlin will not fight for Christine Lagarde's job as ECB president, with Spain's Pablo Hernández de Cos and the Netherlands' Klaas Knot seen as frontrunners. Germany gives up the captain's chair and keeps a seat at the table instead. The monetary-policy version of: I don't want to be captain, I just want the wheel within reach.

The ECB is politically independent. That is exactly why capitals negotiate so passionately over which country the independent people come from.

Formally, board members do not represent their home countries. In practice every capital checks the passports closely. For German savers and borrowers this is not just folklore: the board prepares the rate decisions that move mortgages, savings accounts and public debt from Lisbon to Helsinki. Klingbeil has not named anyone yet. The Chancellery probably has.