The current President of the Eurogroup, Paschal Donohoe, was re-elected by consensus on Monday 7 July for a third two-and-a-half-year mandate. With no rival among his peers, he joins former Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker in terms of longevity.
Saying he was “honoured” to continue in his role, Mr Donohoe said he would maintain his “method” of working. We must now “further strengthen our common currency area and facilitate tangible progress on our key work streams during this next mandate – from budgetary coordination to the Capital Markets Union, and from the digital euro to the Banking Union”.
The ministers’ broad support testifies to their “strong confidence in your leadership”, the European Commissioner for the Economy, Valdis Dombrovskis, told Mr Donohoe at the end of the ministerial meeting. The Executive Director of the European Stability Mechanism, Pierre Gramegna, pointed out that Mr Donohoe had also been reconfirmed as Chair of the Board of Directors of the permanent rescue fund for euro area countries.
In the end, no elections were held on Monday. The two other candidates – the Spanish minister, Carlos Cuerpo, and the Lithuanian minister, Rimantas Šadžius (see EUROPE 13669/14) – had thrown in the towel and announced their withdrawal from the race for the presidency on their arrival at the ministerial meeting, due to a lack of sufficient support.
“We’ve been trying to rally support for the past weeks, including conversations over the weekends and the numbers did not, somehow, get to the 11 votes that we needed”, declared Mr Cuerpo. Referring to the importance of avoiding any fragmentation within the Eurogroup in a turbulent geopolitical context, he thanked the “extensive support” he said he had received.
This is the third unsuccessful bid by a Spanish minister to chair the meeting of euro area finance ministers, following those of Luis De Guindos in July 2015 (see EUROPE 11358/1) and Nadia Calviño (see EUROPE 12524/1). Since then, Mr De Guindos has become Vice-President of the ECB and Ms Calviño President of the EIB.
“My colleague Carlos Cuerpo just announced he was withdrawing from the Eurogroup presidency race. So am I”, said Mr Šadžius. According to him, Mr Donohoe enjoys “a great deal of support within the informal ministerial body, and Carlos and I cannot say the same”. In his view, the main lesson of this electoral “campaign” is that the working methods within the Eurogroup will change (see EUROPE 13663/4). “We need to speed up the decision-making process and be brave enough to tackle the tough issues”, he added. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)