By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – Outgoing European Central Bank Vice President Luis de Guindos is not campaigning against former Banco de España Governor Pablo Hernández de Cos for the ECB presidency, but with each successive interview, he sounds less like someone actively supporting him.

De Guindos’ latest comments to El País, published on Sunday, continued a pattern visible since late last year: progressively weaker praise for his compatriot, coupled with an increasingly explicit effort to subordinate de Cos’s personal prospects to Spain’s broader need for an Executive Board seat.

De Guindos has repeatedly described de Cos in positive terms, so reading his comments as an attempt to knock him out of contention would be misguided (and whatever de Guindos’ private thoughts, he would be highly unlikely to denigrate de Cos publicly anyway).

Still, the direction is conspicuous. As the ECB succession debate has moved from distant speculation toward live political positioning, de Guindos’ public language has become more and more hedged.

In December, when El Periódico asked whether de Cos would have a chance of becoming ECB president, de Guindos sounded genuinely warm. De Cos, he said, “was an excellent governor.” He had “restored Banco de España’s reputation,” understood “precisely how central banks work” and “now holds an important position as General Manager of the Bank for International Settlements.”

Even then, de Guindos did not quite say that his countryman should be the next ECB president, adding that “many factors come into play when these decisions are made.” Still, the personal endorsement was strong.

By March, in an El Mundo interview published on the 23^rd of the month, the tone had shifted. Asked whether the Spanish government should try its luck with de Cos, described by the interviewer as currently best placed, de Guindos again offered praise. “Pablo was a very good governor and is now at the BIS,” he said. “He would be a fine candidate.”

But a pronounced hedging effort followed. It was the Spanish government “that understands the circumstances and knows how to best play its hand,” he observed. “Above and beyond individual names, I think that what really matters is that Spain has a presence on the ECB’s Executive Board.”

The point was clear: de Cos is a credible name, but Spain’s institutional claim is larger than one candidacy. The objective is less about making the former Banco de España governor the next ECB president than about ensuring that Spain, the Eurozone’s fourth-largest economy, is not absent from the ECB’s six-member Executive Board.

Sunday’s El País interview brought that hierarchy of priorities into stark relief.

In less than a month, Spain will no longer have a seat on the Executive Board. Within a year and a half, three seats will become vacant, including the presidency. Financial Times polling has pointed to de Cos as the frontrunner. Was this Spain’s opportunity? de Guindos was asked.

De Guindos did not take the opportunity to launch a Spanish presidential campaign; far from it. “The presidency would undoubtedly be the best outcome, but the most important thing is to have a seat on the Executive Board,” he said.

So, Spain should of course prefer the presidency if it can get it, but the key thing is Board-level representation, not the top job.

His treatment of de Cos was also notably cooler than in earlier interviews. This time, de Cos was not an “excellent governor” who had restored Banco de España’s reputation, or even just a “very good governor.” He was “a good governor,” and even that was followed immediately by a qualification: the restructuring of Spain’s banking sector had in fact been overseen by former Banco de España Governor Luis Linde and former Deputy Governor Fernando Restoy.

That qualification is important, given that the Spanish banking sector restructuring is one of the more obvious credentials available in any argument for Spain’s central banking seriousness after the financial crisis. By giving the credit to Linde and Restoy—who, as he made clear, had overseen the “entire” process—de Guindos undermined the crisis-manager case for de Cos.

Nor did de Guindos give much weight to the idea that central bank watchers can identify the next ECB president by ranking the technocratic field. The presidency, he said, “is a political matter” decided by the European Council. This is indisputably so, but context is everything, and here the observation punctures somewhat the notion that the succession can be thought of as a professional beauty contest in which de Cos’s standing in a poll settles the question.

De Guindos is well aware that Executive Board appointments, while judgments of individual competence, are inevitably also decisions about nationality, coalition-building, timing, gender, geography and the distribution of institutional spoils.

Indeed, he was unusually candid in saying that, while ECB policymakers must look at matters from a European perspective, “all of us are influenced by national events.”

For Spain, the fact that ECB succession is a political allocation problem creates a strategic challenge. A campaign focusing on the presidency to the exclusion of other options is risky. If Spain makes the race all about de Cos and the presidency goes elsewhere, Madrid could find itself needing to fight for a regular Board seat under less favorable conditions.

De Guindos appears determined not to let that happen. His comments keep de Cos in the game, but they also keep Spain’s options open. The former governor can be a candidate, just not the entirety of the Spanish case for representation.

The trend in de Guindos’ language is therefore revealing. In December, with the succession question still relatively abstract, praise for de Cos was unstinting. In March, the praise was still clear, but the emphasis shifted to the government’s need to play its hand and to Spain’s Executive Board presence more generally. In May, with the calendar moving closer to the actual succession fight, the endorsement became markedly more lukewarm and the national objective much more explicit.

This may simply reflect increasing caution. The closer a political decision comes, the less appropriate it would be for a sitting ECB vice president to sound as though he is publicly managing a national candidacy. But the result is the same: de Guindos is steadily making Spain’s ECB ambition bigger than de Cos.

That may also be the more realistic Spanish position. The presidency is not the only prize, so if Spain cannot secure it, it will still want a Board seat. And if the presidency is ultimately decided by European leaders on political grounds, then a Spanish strategy built entirely around the technocratic appeal of de Cos would be too narrow.

De Guindos, of course, is not saying that explicitly. But at each successive opportunity, he sounds less like he is trying to make a Spaniard the inevitable next ECB president than like he wants to ensure that, whatever happens, Spain still gets back on the Board.