Well-designed institutions should be immune to bad leaders, at least up to a point. That is unfortunately not the case in the eurozone, where the next round of appointments matters more than it should. Choosing Mario Draghi’s successor as president of the European Central Bank in November 2019 will be the most important. There is a good chance that European leaders will get it wrong — in more than one way.
They could do worse than begin the process with a counterfactual observation: what would have happened had the job gone to a more conventional central banker than Mr Draghi? Would the governing council of the ECB have converged on the same views and policies? I doubt that very much.
Mr Draghi’s most important contribution was not his celebrated 2012 pledge to do “whatever it takes” to end the crisis. That mattered at the time, but it was never translated into law. Far more significant was the start of quantitative easing in March 2015, more critical even than the establishment of the European Stability Mechanism in 2012 or the start of the banking union in 2014.