By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – The list of credible candidates to succeed European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde has barely changed in months, but the absence of new names is itself notable.

It does not mean the race is decided; such decisions are political, murky and occasionally surprising. Lagarde herself was hardly a top market candidate before being chosen in 2019.

Still, the longer the list of plausible names refuses to grow, the harder it becomes to imagine alternatives. Any candidate likely to outclass former De Nederlandsche Bank President Klaas Knot, former Banco de España Governor Pablo Hernández de Cos or Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel — or even just to rank alongside them as a comparably credible name — might reasonably be expected to have surfaced by now.

Instead, the ECB presidency debate revolves with great consistency around a relatively small pool of familiar figures, including the above. Though it doesn’t follow that any one of them has to be the winner, the absence of a new name could be good news for Knot in particular.

Nagel remains what we called him last July: the right German, but at the wrong time. On paper, the case for him is strong. He is experienced, institutionally credible, less doctrinaire than the Bundesbank stereotype and correspondingly more acceptable to southern Europe as an ECB president.

If Germany were ever to get the top ECB job, Nagel — who is said to want the position — would thus be the logical vehicle. The difficulty is that this may not be the moment when Germany can plausibly claim it.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and ECB Supervisory Board Chair Claudia Buch are both German. The idea that von der Leyen might conveniently vacate the Commission for the German presidency has not gained traction, and Chancellor Friedrich Merz does not seem likely to push for such an outcome.

That leaves Nagel in an awkward position, given the foreseeable reluctance of other Eurozone governments to accept yet another German at the head of a core European institution, particularly one as sensitive as the ECB, when Berlin is already amply represented.

Our baseline remains that an ECB President Nagel is unlikely for now — the political constellation conducive to this has simply not materialized yet and may never do so.

De Cos has the technocratic credentials, the personal reputation and the across-the-aisle respect that would normally make him an especially compelling candidate. Yet his obstacles have also not gone away. He only recently became general manager of the Bank for International Settlements, a post that is too important, too visible and too associated with central-bank continuity to be abandoned casually.

Even the ECB presidency, the only Board seat for which one could imagine him making such a move, would require him to walk away from the BIS well before the natural point at which leaving Basel would not raise questions.

A second hurdle is political. De Cos cannot really campaign for the ECB presidency in his current position. Nor is there much visible evidence of a Spanish government push, though Madrid may have little incentive to clarify its intentions this early.

Perhaps this helps account for outgoing ECB Vice President Luis de Guindos’ apparent reluctance to back de Cos with any great force, and his prioritization of Spain’s broader claim to Board representation over his compatriot’s personal aspirations to succeed Lagarde.

There is of course a “second tier” of potential candidates, but those most often mentioned are generally unconvincing. This is especially true of outgoing Banque de France Governor François Villeroy de Galhau. France has already held the ECB presidency twice, Villeroy would be old by the standards of previous incoming presidents, and the decision to leave his central bank for a Catholic charity hardly looks like the prelude to a campaign for the top job in Frankfurt.

Banca d’Italia Governor Fabio Panetta, just five months younger than Villeroy, is not a better answer, as we have previously explained. Though it is hard to miss his newfound preference for conveying an unaccustomed impression of centrism in his public communication, the obvious question is: if Isabel Schnabel’s existing Board mandate bars her from consideration for the presidency, why would Panetta’s prior Board service not also be problematic?

Then there is European Investment Bank President Nadia Calviño. She has political stature and European experience, but not the central-banking or market-crisis-management reputation that would matter if the next ECB president is expected to steer the institution through turbulence amid a difficult fiscal backdrop.

France, in particular, is unlikely to be indifferent to that issue. Paris will presumably want an ECB president with market credibility and the capacity to manage turbulence without looking like a hostage to it. Knot has that aura; Lagarde had it in a different but still relevant form. Calviño, less so.

There is also the question of whether Calviño should leave the European Investment Bank so soon. The EIB presidency is not a holding pen, and an early departure would raise its own questions. It would also create another top job to be bargained over, making her candidacy part of a yet more complicated institutional deal.

Still, Calviño has one asset no male candidate can match. With Lagarde and Schnabel both due to leave the Board in 2027, the only two women on the Executive Board will be gone. Spain may conclude that Calviño is its best shot at the presidency.

We continue to see a meaningful chance of Lagarde leaving alongside Executive Board member Philip Lane, whose term as ECB chief economist ends in May 2027. Such timing would allow France to pursue the chief economist position without having two French nationals simultaneously on the Executive Board.

That would make political sense and would also make a French step down from the presidency to the chief economist portfolio more palatable: if Paris can secure the latter role, it may not need the former, especially given how difficult a third French presidency would be to sell.

Meanwhile, the selection of Croatian National Bank Governor Boris Vujčić to succeed de Guindos may help Knot more than it hurts him. Though moderately hawkish, Vujčić is no Northern European and therefore presents no geographic obstacle to a later Knot presidency. That will not have been lost on governments already thinking ahead to the ECB’s next vacancy.

For Germany, Knot is the optimal fallback. If Lagarde can’t be followed by a German, he is the next best option from Berlin’s perspective: stability-oriented, deeply experienced, fiscally serious and institutionally orthodox. We expect him to receive German support in addition to that of his own government.

The question is who would stop him. At least one report has suggested that former ECB President Mario Draghi, Knot’s most important adversary from the sovereign-debt-crisis era, would be vehemently opposed. That may be, but it is hard to imagine Draghi, long out of any office, actually vetoing anything, and still harder to identify the Italian counterproposal that would make such resistance politically meaningful.

De Cos is of course an option for Spain, which has repeatedly emphasized its desire to retain an Executive Board presence. Madrid may be playing its cards close to its chest simply because there is no need to make its intentions clear at such an early stage — and perhaps even a disadvantage in doing so. That is all the more so if its aspirations concern not de Cos but Calviño; for all the more substantive objections to her candidacy, the gender angle is bound to reemerge eventually.

The main caveat is the dark horse. Someone can always surface late, and Lagarde herself is the obvious warning against treating the public list of central bankers as exhaustive. But Lagarde was a wild card, not an unknown. She had been French finance minister and managing director of the International Monetary Fund. A late entrant would have to be similarly established, broadly acceptable and politically useful. No comparable wild card has surfaced.

And a horse that dark becomes less probable with time. The arguments against Nagel apply not only to him but to Germans more generally. The bar on reappointing former Executive Board members seems unlikely to be revisited. A third French presidency already, after Jean-Claude Trichet and Lagarde, is hard to imagine. Italy lacks an obvious vehicle. And though Spanish Economy Minister Carlos Cuerpo last year asserted that Spain has "a huge pool of candidates" for high-level European posts, it is not clear who beyond de Cos and Calviño could be serious Spanish contenders for the ECB presidency.

The fact that the old field of potential contenders is the new field may not make Knot the inevitable winner. But the field’s stubborn failure to widen does leave him as the lone candidate whose relative position has improved.