6-way bidding war emerges for ECB vice presidency

Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Portugal will face off for the European Central Bank’s No. 2 job, according to a statement from the Council of the EU.

The crowded race for the vice presidency kickstarts a wider battle for a seat on the ECB’s coveted six-person executive board, the eurozone’s most powerful forum for economic and monetary policy.

Four of the seats, including the presidency itself, will become vacant over the next two years. Competition will be fierce, as the eurozone’s largest economies will seek to maintain their influence on the board, leaving smaller countries with fewer seats to fight over.

Eurozone finance ministers are set to pick the winner behind closed doors in a secret ballot when they meet in Brussels for this month’s Eurogroup meeting on Jan. 19. The winner will need at least 16 votes from the 21 ministers, representing around 65 percent of the eurozone’s population.

Eurozone leaders formally propose the candidate to succeed the outgoing vice president, Luis de Guindos, whose eight-year term ends on May 31. The European Parliament and the ECB are entitled to an opinion about the final pick.

Northern European applicants make up the bulk of the contenders, with Finland’s central banker, Olli Rehn, facing competition from Baltic neighbors. These include his central banking peers, Estonia’s Madis Müller and Latvia’s Mārtiņš Kazāks. Lithuania’s former finance minister, Rimantas Šadžius, completes the Baltic round-up. The other two applicants come from Southern Europe: Portugal’s ex-Eurogroup president, Mário Centeno, and the Croatian central bank governor, Boris Vujčić.

The candidates are tentatively scheduled to face questions from MEPs behind closed doors before finance ministers meet on Jan. 19.