By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Governing Council member Pierre Wunsch is hardly the least serious name in the discussion about who will eventually succeed ECB President Christine Lagarde, making his multiple drawbacks as a potential candidate all the more deserving of scrutiny.

A recent Belgian press report cited Wunsch, head of the National Bank of Belgium, as a possible candidate. It is easy to class such reporting with an Italian newspaper’s view of Banca d’Italia Governor Fabio Panetta as Lagarde’s ideal successor and a French news outlet’s treatment of former Banque de France Governor François Villeroy de Galhau as the natural pick.

Wunsch, however, is a trained economist, a smooth talker and a policymaker with a reputation for challenging the consensus. On the face of it, therefore, one might easily ask: why not? To which one might respond: just what would Wunsch offer that the field lacks?

The job, as Croatian National Bank Governor Boris Vujčić’s selection as vice president showed, goes to someone who solves a European puzzle, as Lagarde did in 2019. Former De Nederlandsche Bank President Klaas Knot could also solve one if Germany cannot claim the presidency but still wants a stability-oriented, northern, fiscally serious candidate. Similarly, former Banco de España Governor Pablo Hernández de Cos could solve one if Spain got behind him and if the potential complication of his new role at the Bank for International Settlements were resolved. For that matter, European Investment Bank President Nadia Calviño could also solve one – or even two, counting gender balance.

Wunsch, however, is less a missing piece than a piece from some other puzzle.

True, Belgium is a founding member of the European project. But Belgium is still not a natural ECB presidency country in the way Germany, France, Italy or Spain might be. Nor is Belgium the Netherlands, whose candidate can at least be sold as the nearest substitute for a German.

Less than ideal though it may be, when leaders bargain over any top EU job, country weight, geographic balance, institutional precedent and the broader appointments package all enter the equation. Wunsch might bring competence – like all the others – but not an obvious national claim.

That is all the more so given that, for its modest size, Belgium has hardly lacked access to top European posts. Charles Michel held the European Council presidency until late 2024, Koen Lenaerts currently heads the Court of Justice of the European Union, and Peter Praet held one of the ECB’s most important Executive Board portfolios relatively recently as chief economist. None of this bars Wunsch, but it weakens any argument that Belgium is now the country to satisfy.

And Belgian or not, Wunsch is Francophone, further complicating things. After all, France, which has given the ECB two presidents to date, including the incumbent, is already central to the next ECB package. Our longstanding view is that there is a meaningful chance Lagarde leaves alongside Executive Board member Philip Lane, whose term as chief economist ends in May 2027, allowing Paris to seek that role without having two French nationals simultaneously on the Executive Board.

If France is positioning itself for Lane’s portfolio, a Wunsch presidency could leave the Board too heavily tilted toward the Francophone sphere, even without a second French national.

The irony is that France, despite the common language, has ample reason to be dubious about an ECB President Wunsch. Though he has lately sought to cast himself as more moderate, last year opening the door to rates slightly below 2% before backpedaling and declaring that he had “dropped my slight dovish bias,” he is a hawk, and not an especially mild one.

In particular, he has repeatedly taken aim at Paris, calling French fiscal developments “an accident waiting to happen” and bemoaning the threat of “fiscal dominance” over monetary policy. One can agree, but the point is that fiscally vulnerable countries, including some of the euro area’s largest members, are unlikely to take comfort in the thought that, if spreads came under pressure, an ECB President Wunsch would rush to prevent market stress from becoming self-reinforcing.

In this regard, France would understandably see Knot as the better choice. And for Germany as well, the logic of Knot is compelling. If a German cannot follow Lagarde, Knot is the next best thing: northern, orthodox, experienced, fiscally serious and well known to markets. Wunsch, meanwhile, is stability-oriented enough to please some (and alarm others), but is still not the obvious German fallback.

His taste for dissent also has a less flattering aspect. The ECB president is not just any Governing Council member. The president must forge consensus, sell compromise and communicate the body’s collective view even when internal disagreements are sharp.

On that count, Wunsch’s profile is anything but an obvious fit for the role. He is no consensus-builder in the Lagarde mold. Whatever one thinks of her monetary policy instincts or communication missteps, she is widely credited with having greatly reduced the sense of open factional warfare inside the Council and made the ECB more governable after the Draghi-Weidmann years.

Wunsch would represent a sharp departure from that leadership style. He is not merely willing to dissent; his public profile is more that of a forceful policy critic than a natural broker of compromise. That may work at a national central bank, but it is harder to see why leaders would entrust such a profile with the task of building consensus among 26 policymakers.

The question, then, is whether governments would want to replace a president renowned for adept coalition management with one better known for dissent, criticism and self-certainty.

Perhaps the most important example is the ECB’s July 2021 implementation of the strategy review. While the strategy statement itself was approved unanimously, Wunsch and then-Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann were the two final holdouts against the forward guidance revision intended to operationalize the ECB’s new framework.

Again, one can agree with the principle. After all, the ECB’s forward guidance soon collided with the inflation surge, and those who worried that the central bank was tying its own hands were not obviously wrong.

But for a presidency candidacy, his opposition also recalls Wunsch as one of the few policymakers unwilling to fall in behind Lagarde at a defining moment for the post-2021 ECB.

That problem is reinforced by Wunsch’s repeated criticism of ECB models. Yet again, much of the criticism is defensible. The inflation shock badly exposed the limits of model-based comfort, and Wunsch was right to argue for humility after a period in which central banks underestimated persistence.

But the president has to present staff projections every three months and preserve market confidence in the analytical machinery behind them. A president so closely associated with the view that models misled the institution would face an obvious question at every turn: does he believe the projections he is presenting today?

Wunsch’s communication style is also not an unalloyed advantage. He speaks fluidly but sometimes bluntly. His profile seems more that of a sharp internal critic than of a compromise candidate who could immediately reassure multiple constituencies.

Nor is visibility the missing ingredient. Wunsch has lately seemed unusually keen to get his share of the pie of public attention, not to mention at least one recent closed-door meeting with London bankers and asset managers in a paid-access setting of the kind many central banks regard skeptically.

Governing Council members talk, of course, and some are more fond of the limelight than others. But in the context of succession speculation, Wunsch’s marked shift to a much higher intervention frequency looks less like routine communication than self-positioning.

Leaders would still have to ask why they should choose him when the field already contains candidates whose political logic is much easier to explain.

There is also little evidence that Belgium would push Wunsch with the necessary vigor. He was reappointed to a second term as NBB governor, but the process did not suggest that he would automatically have the enthusiastic support of his government for a future ECB presidency campaign. Nor is he an obvious party-family fit for an EPP-driven bargain of the kind that appears to have helped Vujčić get the nod in the vice presidential contest.

By contrast, Knot can plausibly obtain Dutch and German support. De Cos could become formidable if Spain genuinely mobilized behind him. Calviño has gender, Spain and broader European political experience. Nagel has Germany, if the German obstacle can be overcome. Wunsch has Belgium and a reputation for dissent: not enough.

Even the argument that he would widen the field is weaker than it looks. Wunsch would add a serious technocrat to the list, but not a new solution.

He is male at a moment when the departures of Lagarde and Isabel Schnabel in 2027 will remove the only two women from the Executive Board. He is Francophone when the current president is French and France is likely to seek the chief economist job. He is from a small country that has recently held prominent EU positions and already had the ECB chief economist portfolio relatively recently. He is stability-oriented, but less German than Knot. He is intellectually forceful, but too associated with dissent and model criticism to look like the natural institutional steward.

His possible emergence therefore does not really contradict the argument we made recently that the Lagarde succession field is failing to widen in a meaningful way. It is trivial to simply propose another serious central banker; it is harder to put forward a name that changes the balance. Wunsch does not.

That is not because the suggestion is absurd; he would not be technically out of his depth. But he would arrive with a small-country problem, a Belgian-precedent problem, a Francophone-balance problem, a gender problem, a model-critic problem, a consensus-building problem, a leadership-style problem and a Knot-comparison problem.

That is a lot of baggage for a candidate whose main contribution to the race would be to show how hard it is to improve on the familiar contenders.