By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – OMFIF’s new survey on who should succeed European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde is interesting chiefly as a snapshot of elite chatter, because it treats the ECB presidency as if the position were being filled by a search committee weighing CVs against a competency matrix.

In reality, the office is filled not via a technocratic hiring exercise, but through a political process in which euro area member states put forward names, the Eurogroup agrees on a candidate, the Council recommends that candidate and the European Council in euro area composition makes the appointment by reinforced qualified majority after consulting the European Parliament and the ECB Governing Council.

In other words, the people who will settle this question are not sitting around assigning weighted scores for “capital markets knowledge,” “consensus building” or “European credentials.” They will want a candidate who is plainly qualified (as all the serious names are), but above all who can be agreed politically in the context of national balances, other looming ECB vacancies and the broader European appointments chessboard.

OMFIF says the ranking is based on 20 respondents, only 11 of them from the euro area, drawn exclusively from its network of advisers, which it describes as “a broad international group of commercial bankers, current and former policy officials and central bankers, asset managers, development finance officers and others.” That is far too small a sample to tell us much about what the actual deciders are likely to do.

The ranking also suffers from false precision. Using a five-point scale and just 20 respondents, OMFIF nonetheless suggests that separating some candidates requires “a second decimal point.” That gives the exercise a spurious air of granularity. In a sample this small, tiny differences in scores are not meaningful in any robust sense.

The survey’s most questionable categories are the ones that rely most heavily on political judgment. Asking this small group to score “political capital,” “ability to attract endorsement from other member states” and “European credentials” is asking non-deciders to guess how heads of government will trade off nationality, ideology, institutional balance and deal-making. That is much more speculative than the chart suggests. The exercise gives subjective political guesses the look of objective measurement.

The results also short-change Executive Board member Isabel Schnabel. There is of course the well-known obstacle to her candidacy in that Board terms are non-renewable, and she has served since January 2020. OMFIF rightly notes that. That is not a competence issue. Once the survey moves beyond institutional obstacles and starts ranking substantive qualifications, its treatment of Schnabel becomes difficult to take seriously. Putting Banque de France Governor François Villeroy de Galhau in the top three for central banking experience and capital markets knowledge, with Schnabel nowhere to be found, is absurd.

Former Dutch National Bank Governor Klaas Knot is also poorly served. OMFIF itself concedes that he leads in central banking experience and highlights his role in devising crisis tools and his work on non-bank finance risks at the Financial Stability Board. Yet the same survey leaves him out of its top three for “European credentials,” where it places Villeroy and Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel behind former Bank of Spain Governor Pablo Hernández de Cos. That is at least odd, given that Knot led the DNB from 2011 to 2025, sat on the ECB Governing Council throughout that period and chaired the Financial Stability Board from late 2021 to mid-2025. Such an outcome raises questions about the coherence of OMFIF’s categories.

Then there is Villeroy himself. OMFIF describes him not as a core front-runner but a “less likely fifth possibility.” Yet the survey repeatedly ranks him unusually highly: first on political capital, second on leadership and European credentials, third on central banking experience, capital markets knowledge, consensus building, endorsement potential, and crisis management. If he is only a peripheral possibility, the chart does not show it. And if the chart is meant seriously, the article’s own framing does not.

More fundamentally, Villeroy is an odd inclusion in any serious succession ranking. He will be pushing 69 at the end of Lagarde’s formal term of office, whereas previous ECB presidents were between 60 years, 10 months (Jean-Claude Trichet) and 64 years, 2 months (Mario Draghi) when they took office. He has already announced that he will step down as governor of the Banque de France in June 2026 to take over a Catholic charity, Fondation des Apprentis d’Auteuil. He has also long been identified as one of the ECB’s most dovish voices. His presence in the survey blurs the line between genuine contenders and background noise.

There is one more weakness worth stressing. Polls like this inherently assume the field is already known and stable. Succession races of this kind often are not. Even market economists looking at the contest have noted that a compromise candidate could emerge later, just as Lagarde herself did in 2019. That is another reason to be careful about overinterpreting a tiny survey of respondents. A list of perceived front-runners can soon become obsolete once real bargaining starts.

OMFIF’s piece is thus a map of what a small circle of OMFIF advisers thinks. That at least tells us that de Cos remains highly regarded, that Nagel and Knot are taken seriously, and that Schnabel’s institutional obstacle continues to weigh on outside perceptions. On the question of who will actually get the job, politics will dominate and package deals will matter. OMFIF’s competency matrix will prove largely beside the point.