The candidates

Alex BRENNINKMEIJER

Brenninkmeijer has been the ombudsman of the Netherlands since 2005. He began his second six-year term in 2011, after receiving the backing of the Dutch parliament. A lawyer, he has spent most of his career in the academic world and also served as a judge, including at the Dutch central social security tribunal, of which he was vice-president in 1995-2000. In 1992-95, he was professor for civil procedural law at the University of Amsterdam; in 1995-2000, he was professor for constitutional and administrative law at the University of Leiden, including two years as dean of the law school. He has written  a book on mediation. Brenninkmeijer has been president of the European board of the International Ombudsman Institute since last year. 

Markus JAEGER

Jaeger, who has a background in law, has been head of the Council of Europe’s migration co-ordination division since last year. The German has been with the Council of Europe since 1989, with a gap in 2000-02 during which he was deputy legal director and acting general counsel of Interpol. In 2002-09, he served as deputy to the director of the office of the Council’s commissioner for human rights, tasked, among other things, with building a peer-to-peer network of ombudsmen in the Council’s 47 member states. In 2009-11, he was head of co-operation with national ombudsmen in the Council’s human rights department. He has also overseen human-rights training for the staff of national ombudsmen.

Emily O’REILLY

O’Reilly is Ireland’s national ombudsman. She was appointed by the Irish president in 2003 and is on her second six-year term. On both occasions she received the unanimous backing of the parliament. O’Reilly’s nomination has the support of 80 MEPs, compared with more than 100 for each of the three nominees who are sitting MEPs. A former journalist and broadcaster, O’Reilly won a Nieman journalism fellowship at Harvard University in 1988 and serves on the advisory board of the Nieman programme. She graduated in European languages from University College Dublin and holds a graduate diploma in education from Trinity College Dublin. O’Reilly, a mother of five, speaks French, Irish and Spanish.

Ria OOMEN-RUIJTEN

A Christian Democrat, Oomen-Ruijten has been an MEP since 1989, having served in the Dutch House of Representatives in 1981-89. As a member of the European Parliament’s foreign-affairs committee, she has been the lead MEP on Turkey since 2007. She is also a member of the delegation to the EU-Russia parliamentary co-operation committee. In 1992-99, she served as first vice-president of the centre-right European People’s Party group. She has focused in her parliamentary work on environmental and consumer issues, healthcare and social issues, and Turkey and Russia. Earlier this year, Oomen-Ruijten stood down as chairwoman of the Dutch Foundation for Consumer Complaints Boards after almost three decades in the job.

Dagmar ROTH-BEHRENDT

Roth-Behrendt has been an MEP since 1989, representing a central Berlin district for the German Social Democrats. A lawyer by training, in the European Parliament she has focused on the environment and consumer protection, but also on administration and staffing. She served twice (in 2004-07 and 2009-12) as a Parliament vice-president in charge of personnel matters, and is currently lead MEP on reform of the EU’s staff regulations. She is also preparing a report on improving the efficiency of the Parliament’s administration. Roth-Behrendt, one of the longest-serving MEPs, announced in March that she would not stand for re-election next year. She is married to Horst Reichenbach, head of the European Commission’s taskforce for Greece.

Francesco SPERONI

Speroni, a lawyer, has been an MEP for the Lega Nord since 1999, having also been an MEP in 1989-94. He is co-chairman of the Europe for Freedom and Democracy group and vice-chairman of the delegation to the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly. Speroni was minister for institutional reform in the first government of Silvio Berlusconi in 1994-95 and a member of the Italian Senate in 1992-99. He has also served on the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Speroni has courted controversy with comments about the need for the armed protection of Italy’s borders against migrants, and about Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011, and whose ideas, according to Speroni, were concerned with the defence of western civilisation.

Yves Mersch – Memory man

Profile of ECB’s executive board member

When Jean-Claude Trichet and Jürgen Stark left the European Central Bank two years ago, to be succeeded by 40-something Benoît Cœuré and Jörg Asmussen, 25 years of institutional memory left with them. Indeed, out of the 23-member ECB Governing Council meeting today (5 September) in Frankfurt, 14 were doing other jobs when Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis broke in early 2010.

Following this upheaval in the council’s personnel and the change in the ECB’s leadership under President Mario Draghi, the appointment of Yves Mersch in December to the bank’s six-member executive board was comforting even to internal critics of the Trichet-Stark axis.

The wiry 63-year-old Luxembourger – he was a competitive gymnast until the age of 45 – brought institutional memory back to the board. Like Trichet and Stark, Mersch was at the 1988 Hannover summit that re-launched the monetary-union process, and he took part in the Maastricht Treaty negotiations. As governor of the Banque Centrale du Luxembourg, and now a board member, he has unbroken service on the governing council since its creation in 1998 and, by the time he retires in 2020, he will have completed 22 years on this decision-making committee.

In the financial markets, Mersch is regarded as an anti-inflation “hawk” in the mould of Stark and Jens Weidmann and Axel Weber, the current and former presidents of the Deutsche Bundesbank. In fact, his position is more nuanced and – as befits his legal training – closer to the Freiburg school of economists that championed a refereed free market or “Ordoliberalismus” (ordered liberalism) and to Otmar Issing, the Würzburg professor who went on to design the fledgling ECB’s policy framework.

Mersch has understood that crisis times required a crisis response. He had no hesitation in supporting generous liquidity policies that drove short-term interest rates to unprecedentedly low levels, and he remains open in principle to prepare for taking them negative. While in May 2010 he voiced concerns over Trichet’s unconditional debt-purchasing programme, he – unlike Weidmann – supported Draghi’s conditional plan to buy government bonds. Most importantly, when he has been outvoted, in contrast to his Bundesbank colleagues, he has kept silent in public out of loyalty to the institution.

Mersch learned political pragmatism and group loyalty from his father, a Luxembourg supreme-court judge and a member of the resistance to Nazi occupation. Pragmatism was a necessary corrective for the times; Mersch, who in his youth was aligned to the centre-left Luxembourg Socialist Workers’ Party, chose the Sorbonne in the aftermath of 1968 to study law and political science. The economics he learned there was so informed by Marxist approaches to planning that, by the time he returned to the Grand Duchy and its finance ministry in 1975 in preparation for a secondment to the International Monetary Fund, his bosses wondered whether he could handle the culture shock.

As it turned out, he could, but it was a shock nevertheless. Until then Mersch, an advocate of Europe’s “social market” model, had only seen the “social” at work; the Fund and the US were his first experience of the “market”, and this was crucial to his education as a policymaker. As assistant to the IMF’s Belgian executive director between 1976 and 1978, Mersch was present at a turbulent moment in the IMF’s history, as the world became accustomed to floating exchange rates and the UK entered an adjustment programme. In Washington he met a Malaysian economist, Tengku Khatijah Ahmad, also seconded by her government, who became his wife – they have a son and a daughter. By the time his two years was up, Mersch was looking for any means to stay, and he managed to secure a short-term position as Luxembourg’s financial counsellor at the UN in New York.

In 1981, now in his early thirties and married, Mersch rejoined the finance ministry as an adviser on international financial and monetary relations. Small government has its career advantages; lacking a full-time specialist counsellor at its permanent representation to the EU, Luxembourg used Mersch as its financial negotiator in Brussels, so giving him a bottom-up view of the EU’s legislative process. Back home, this was a critical time in the development of the monetary policy of the Grand Duchy, which had shared its currency with Belgium for half a century, and had no central bank of its own. Following a unilateral Belgian devaluation in 1982, Luxembourg decided to assert its autonomy by creating a banknote-issuing institute. This would in 1998 turn into the BCL, that Mersch would later run.

Curriculum Vitae

1949: Born in Luxembourg City

1973: Graduated in law from Paris University 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne

1974: Masters in political science, Sorbonne

1975-76: Postgraduate degrees in international law and political science, Sorbonne

1975: Assistant at the Luxembourg finance ministry

1976-78: Seconded to the IMF, Washington

1978-79: Attaché, Luxembourg finance ministry

1980-81: Luxembourg’s financial counsellor at the UN, New York

1981-85: Adviser on international relations, Luxembourg finance ministry

1985-89: Government commissioner for the Luxembourg stock exchange

1989-98: Director of the Luxembourg treasury

1990-91: Representative of finance minister in Maastricht Treaty negotiations

1998- Governor of the Banque Centrale du 2012: Luxembourg (BCL)

2012-: Member of the ECB’s executive board

After four years serving as the government’s commissioner for the Luxembourg stock exchange, Mersch was appointed director of the treasury, which also made him Luxembourg’s delegate to the Communities’ powerful, behind-the-scenes monetary committee. This panel, which later became the economic and financial committee (EFC), was, and remains, the hub of pan-EU economic policy making.

During Mersch’s 15-year term – first as an alternate and then as a full member – the committee, which has been chaired by both Trichet and Draghi, managed the death throes of the exchange-rate mechanism and designed monetary union. He turned down an opportunity to run a European Commission directorate-general under Jacques Santer in 1995, and the choice of Mersch to head the BCL was an inevitability once it was formed in 1998.

It was equally inevitable that Mersch, who had worked closely with Jean-Claude Juncker, first as finance minister and then as prime minister, would be forced to criticise government budgetary and wage policy publicly once he was at the central bank. Mersch paid the price in late 2009 when he bid to replace Lucas Papademos as vice-president of the ECB the following May. Rather than back him strongly, Juncker used the candidacy as leverage to exact concessions on other policy areas, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel switched her support to Vítor Constâncio, the governor of the Portuguese central bank, in the belief that this would open the way for a German president to replace Trichet.

She miscalculated and, by the end of 2011, the ECB presidency and vice-presidency were held by southern Europeans. This was Mersch’s moment. In mid-2012 he was approached by northern governments and asked to renew his bid for a place on the board as José Manuel González Paramo’s eight-year term drew to a close. This time he was lucky in his opponents. Instead of nominating a high-quality female economist, which would have substantially increased their chances of keeping a Spaniard on the board, the Madrid government put forward a male ECB lawyer, while the Slovenians chose a low-profile ex-governor. Much to the annoyance of MEPs who demanded that a woman should be found for the job, Mersch was appointed to the board in December 2012 after a six-month delay.

Memory man Mersch has restored balance to a board top heavy with market experience in Cœuré, Draghi and Peter Praet, and politicking in Asmussen. When Mersch finally retires in 2020, it really will be a brave new world at the ECB.

 

 

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Austerity claims another victim

The harsh world of front-line politics has not been kind to Vítor Gaspar, who stepped down as Portugal’s finance minister this week, plunging the government and the bond markets into crisis.

He seems to be less appreciated in Lisbon than he was in the European Commission, where he was an economic adviser to José Manuel Barroso, the Commission president, and the European Central Bank, where he was director-general of research. 

Gaspar once explained that he had taken the job as head of Barroso’s in-house think-tank in order to see up close how politicians operate. In the end, he got too close.

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Annoncé depuis quelques années, “Le Coeur des hommes 3” va bientôt devenir réalité, avec un changement de taille à la clé, puisque Gérard Darmon y sera remplacé par Eric Elmosnino, qui interprètera un autre personnage.

Depuis le début, Marc Esposito a toujours dit qu’il envisageait le premier Coeur des hommes comme le premier acte d’une trilogie. 1,563 million de spectateurs plus tard, un deuxième épisode a donc vu le jour, avec un succès plus important (1,8 million d’entrées), ouvrant ainsi la porte à un troisième opus. Evoqué depuis quelques années maintenant, Le Coeur des hommes 3 semble aujourd’hui proche de devenir réalité, puisque le tournage doit débuter au mois d’août. Le réalisateur ne va donc plus tarder à retrouver Marc Lavoine, Bernard Campan et Jean-Pierre Darroussin… mais pas Gérard Darmon. Ce dernier a en effet déclaré forfait et sera remplacé par Eric Elmosnino, qui interprètera un autre personnage, dont la teneur n’a pas été révélée. Mais nul doute qu’avec un premier clap aussi proche, nous devrions vite en savoir plus, tandis que l’acteur sera prochainement à l’affiche de Télégaucho, le 12 décembre.

Maximilien Pierrette avec Le Figaro.fr

La bande-annonce du “Coeur des hommes 2” :