By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – By now, one thing is clear: European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde wants to at least preserve the option of leaving her post early.
When she told The Wall Street Journal last week that her “baseline” was that completing her mission would “take until the end of my term,” one might have charitably assumed she simply didn’t realize how noncommittal that sounded.
But it did, and as we were far from the only ones to note this—and the absence of a less ambiguous pledge—her second deployment of the same formulation can no longer be dismissed as clumsy but well-intentioned.
On Sunday, asked point-blank in an interview with American broadcaster CBS about reports that she might step down early, Lagarde reached for the identical sentence: “My baseline is that it will take until the end of my term.”
In other words, twice within days, she chose language that sounds reassuring only if one pretends not to know what “baseline” means for a central banker: a conditional projection, not a commitment.
Lagarde is not some political novice fumbling for the right words; she is a highly practiced communicator in European monetary policy, and she runs an institution whose current policy approach is built around refusing to pre-commit.
The ECB’s meeting-by-meeting posture exists precisely to keep options open under uncertainty, and Lagarde has defended it repeatedly as a feature rather than a bug.
In the CBS exchange, she did the same thing with her own tenure that she does with rates: she wrapped the question in the mandate, declared the outcomes “on track,” and stopped well short of the only sentence that would actually end the story.
The interviewer gave her every opportunity to do exactly that, even translating the question into plain English by asking whether more work “till the end” of the term was implied.
Lagarde answered not with “yes” or with “I will serve my full term,” but with: “I’m not done.”
Her surrounding language underlines the point. Lagarde described herself as “riveted to a mission,” recited a tidy scoreboard—“inflation is at target,” growth “resilient,” unemployment “at the lowest level ever”—and said the task now was to “consolidate all that.”
This is, effectively, a reaction function: as long as the mission continues to require consolidation, the “baseline” is continuity; if conditions change, so can the baseline.
Even her nod to democratic outcomes—“electors… make their choices, and those choices have to be respected”—should leave observers wanting: nowhere did she say that staying is part of respecting those choices.
If Lagarde’s objective were to extinguish speculation, the communications playbook is trivial and well known: offer an unconditional statement, repeat it, and refuse to elaborate. Instead, she has repeatedly chosen the vocabulary of conditionality.
Our Insight on Friday argued that her “baseline” language failed to put the early-departure saga to bed; the CBS interview confirms that this was not a one-off choice but a deliberate decision to keep the exit option alive—just as she refuses to pre-commit on rates.