Brussels, 10/02/2011 (Agence Europe) - On Thursday 10 February, the governor of Germany's central bank, Axel Weber, refused to either confirm or deny rumours in the press that he would like to be the next president of the European Central Bank (ECB), saying that he had talked about the speculation with the German Chancellor and had agreed not to speak publicly about the matter before they had been able to meet again in person and take any decision in close cooperation. He refused to make any further comments, speaking on the fringes of a conference in Vienna, according to reports in AFP.
The Bundesbank governor has long been viewed as favourite to take over from French national Jean-Claude Trichet at the helm of the ECB, whose eight-year term of office runs out in October, but Weber has irritated a number of countries, including France, by coming out publicly against the ECB's programme of buying up eurozone country bonds, saying this counteracts the ECB's terms of reference. Germany wants to head the ECB to erasure its electorate that they will not be asked to cough up more to solve the sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone (see related article). Another potential frontrunner for Germany is Klaus Regling, who heads the temporary EFSF fund that provided financial aid to Ireland recently.
The rumours about Weber's future also mention the possible candidacy of the governor of Italy's central bank, Mario Draghi, but the vice-president of the ECB, Portugal's Vitor Constâncio, also comes from a southern European country and the head of the new European Banking Authority, Andrea Enria, is Italian. Other names regularly quoted are the governor of Luxembourg's central bank, Yves Mersch, and the governor of Finland's central bank, Erkki Liikanen, but EU Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn, and the chair of the Eurogroup, Jean-Claude Juncker, are of the same nationality as Liikanen and Mersch respectively. (M.B./transl.fl)