ECB Insight: Six Seats, Many Stakes: Who Will Sit on the Executive Board in 2028?
19 November 2025
ECB Insight: Six Seats, Many Stakes: Who Will Sit on the Executive Board in 2028?
- Our call (part 3): Knot to replace Lagarde; Bénassy-Quéré to be next chief economist
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – With less than two years to go until European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde’s scheduled departure, we have been looking at possible candidates with the greatest potential to take the top spot.
Over the last weeks, we examined Finland’s Olli Rehn, the Netherlands’ Klaas Knot, Spain’s Pablo Hernández de Cos, Germany’s Joachim Nagel and, though less likely, Portugal’s Mário Centeno. We also considered possible dark horses.
We then zoomed out to consider the Executive Board as a whole, and in September predicted that when ECB Vice President Luis de Guindos steps aside on 1 June 2026, Rehn would succeed him.
In October, we argued that Philip Lane’s successor – probably not as chief economist but rather as a regular Board member – would likely be Latvia’s Mārtiņš Kazāks or Croatia’s Boris Vujčić (with a chance of Latvian national Valdis Dombrovskis).
It is time now to reconsider the most important seat on the Board – that of the president – and hazard an educated guess as to who might succeed Lagarde. Because the succession we anticipate would necessarily trigger a related change on the Board, this instalment considers both vacancies together.
From 1 November 2027: Klaas Knot replaces Christine Lagarde as president
We expect one of the big three EU member states to provide or at least dictate the new occupant of Lagarde's chair when she retires on 31 October 2027. With France having already provided two ECB presidents and Italy one, it is high time for a German to be asked to dance.
However, German national Claudia Buch currently chairs the Supervisory Board of the ECB until January 2029, while another German, Ursula von der Leyen, will be not quite three years into her second five-year term as European Commission president.
We therefore assume for present purposes that Lagarde's successor will be someone amenable to Berlin but not a card-carrying German, not even Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel, as ideal as he would be in some ways.
The obvious choice is then former De Nederlandsche Bank President Klaas Knot. As we said in discussing Knot previously, “no policymaker combines academic authority, market credibility and institutional experience the way Knot does.”
Germany would surely be delighted to see someone of Knot’s caliber calling the shots in Frankfurt – a non-German whose policy instincts and institutional style nevertheless align closely with Berlin’s traditional preferences.
Last month, Lagarde herself all but anointed him, agreeing wholeheartedly that he “could, absolutely” lead the ECB.
As Knot is naturally interested in the job, we continue to expect that he will keep himself relevant and visible until the time comes. He has been doing just that so far, so that with some confidence we expect his appointment to eventually acquire an air of inevitability.
Of course, there are yet others who might share his interest in shaping monetary policy for the euro area at the highest level. We discussed the most salient other options already (see the stories to which we link above) and for various reasons deemed them less likely.
Knot it is. Arguably the most qualified president the ECB will have ever had in its still short history.
From 1 November 2027: Agnès Bénassy-Quéré replaces Frank Elderson, becomes chief economist
However, the story doesn’t end there. One consequence of Knot’s appointment will be the departure of fellow Dutch national Frank Elderson.
Elderson’s mandate would normally run until 14 December 2028, but he will necessarily be induced to exit a little sooner, given the ECB’s institutional norm against double-representation, a norm that has overridden individual term expectations before.
His abdication would not be unprecedented. Executive Board member Lorenzo Bini Smaghi was pressured into resigning in December 2011 so that another Italian — Mario Draghi — could assume the presidency.
At the time, France helped a reluctant Bini Smaghi see the light, and we are sure it would do no less for Elderson. After all, Elderson’s exit would allow Paris to send one of its own to Frankfurt, thus maintaining a French presence on the Board – de rigueur from the perspective of the French establishment – following Lagarde’s departure.
This is more speculative than any of our previous suppositions, but we think France would put forward Agnès Bénassy-Quéré, second deputy governor at Banque de France and formerly chief economist at the French Treasury as well as, previously, deputy chair of the French Council of Economic Analysis.
We predict in this case that Bénassy-Quéré will become ECB chief economist. She is a bona fide economic researcher whose credentials are up to the standards of this demanding portfolio.
There are naturally other names already being floated of potential candidates who can also point to stellar qualifications.
Bénassy-Quéré has at least one advantage in that she is already a high-ranking official of the French central bank. Another might be that ever since March 2023, she regularly accompanies Governor Villeroy to ECB Governing Council monetary policy meetings, including every one so far this year.
Some Council members question whether her personality is forceful enough for the position. In her defense, one observed that “she's a soft-spoken person, but that might be a gender bias.”
No one who spoke to us doubted her intellectual qualifications.
She would not technically be slotted into the position of chief economist but rather appointed to the Board and only then assigned that portfolio. Still, it surely doesn’t hurt that France would be pleased at the prospect of one of its nationals securing such a role — something that would improve the balance of ECB power in Paris’ eyes.
In any case, an all-male Executive Board could be politically untenable. Even if German Board member Isabel Schnabel is replaced by a woman just a few weeks later, Bénassy-Quéré’s appointment would pre-empt any temporary regression in gender balance.
With two female members, the current 2:4 ratio would be maintained — an outcome that could be seen as the minimum acceptable by key EU institutions.
In the next instalment of this series, we will consider the subsequent vacancy, set to occur when Isabel Schnabel leaves two months after Lagarde on 31 December 2027, and thus the composition of the Board as it enters 2028.