The withdrawal of Italy’s candidate from the race for the leadership of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) has left only two hopefuls.
However, neither Luxembourg’s Pierre Gramegna nor Portugual’s João Leão, both former foreign ministers, have polled the required 80% of votes, the President of the Eurogroup, Paschal Donohoe (Ireland), said on Monday at the end of a meeting in Brussels, “so we’ll get back to it in September.”
Marco Buti, an Italian senior civil servant and is also the current Chief of Staff of the European Commissioner for the Economy, Paolo Gentiloni, was Italy’s candidate to replace the first and only director of the ESM since its creation, Klaus Regling of Germany. Regeling’s second five-year term comes to an end in October.
The ESM, an intergovernmental institution based in Luxembourg is a sort of “European IMF” that was set up in 2012 following the Greek public debt crisis. It can intervene if a state falls into a debt spiral, as was the case with Greece the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008.
In future, it will also be able to serve as a safety net to urgently finance the banking union, should a major bank fail.
