Top EU jobs go to women

The Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Christine Lagarde, recently said “whenever the situation is really, really bad, you call in a woman.” She has been nominated as the next president of the troubled European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt and will take charge in October this year, replacing Mario Draghi, the incumbent president of eight years. The Eurozone is going through hard times right now and Lagarde will have to manage the world’s second largest economy’s monetary policy. The European Union (EU) is experiencing slow growth, low inflation and extremely low interest rates. Germany, which is the biggest producer in the EU, is facing a slowdown in production and sagging exports. Italy and France are witnessing stagnant growth. The entire Eurozone, comprising of 19 countries, is facing recession and there is much talk of more stimulus measures coming from the ECB even though there are only a few left that have not been tried. The deposit rate, which is the rate commercial banks pay to deposit money at the ECB, is already minus 0.4 percent. But the ECB is set to reduce it further in September.

Christine Lagarde is not an economist but a lawyer by training, but her eight years of experience as the Managing Director of the IMF will stand her in good stead in understanding the intricacies of running the EU economy.

Mario Draghi is trying to buy more corporate and government bonds to inject liquidity in the economy that will help in pushing down short-term interest rates. Inflation is below the target of two per cent but demand is strong and wages are rising. Yet higher costs are not getting translated into higher prices, hence squeezing profit margins and making exports uncompetitive which have been affected adversely by global trade tensions. The EU is also beset with problems specially related to the settlement of refugees, leading to higher budgetary deficits in some member countries. Even though looser monetary policy is on the cards, it will be up to Lagarde as to what kind of monetary policy to choose in order to manage the current Eurozone crisis. She is not an economist but a lawyer by training, but her eight years of experience as the Managing Director of the IMF will stand her in good stead in understanding the intricacies of running the EU economy, which in turn will affect the course of the world economy. She does not have the experience of a Central Banker and has a daunting task ahead in tackling the current Eurozone crisis. A champion of women’s work and their contribution to a country’s economy, she may want to address the gender imbalance at the ECB which has only two women out of 25 members in the governing council.

Lagarde, however, won by a thin margin in the voting and failed to cross the politically significant threshold of 400 votes out of 747 MEP votes, which signaled that she would face an extremely difficult task of garnering partnership with a Parliament.

Another woman, Ursula von der Leyen, will be the first woman to be elected as the president of the European Commission, replacing the redoubtable current president Jean-Claude Junker of Luxembourg. She will take over from 1 November. She has been the defence minister of Germany from 2013-19 under Angela Merkel and is regarded as her protégé. She has been a member of the German Cabinet since 2005. The role of the European Commission is very important for the EU as it drafts and enforces EU rules and has the power to impose fines on member states. President of the European Commission is the top administrative job of the EU and it is surprising that a doctor by profession and mother of seven children will be filling the post. She, however, won by a thin margin in the voting and failed to cross the politically significant threshold of 400 votes out of 747 MEP votes, which signaled that she would face an extremely difficult task of garnering partnership with a Parliament that is more diverse and divided than at any other point in the EU’s modern history. She was not supported by the Greens because of her pale commitment to climate change and relatively weak efforts towards saving the lives of refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean. The Eurosceptics and rightwing MEPs of Poland and Italy also did not vote for her. Emanuel Macron’s La Republique En Marche Party was solidly behind her showing the strong Franco-German axis in the EU’s future policies.

On the whole, von der Leyen would be presiding over 33,000 people engaged in the Commission’s administration which is a huge responsibility.

She has pledged to tackle various important issues facing the EU like jobs, social security, migration, climate change and security of Europe. She has promised to guarantee minimum wages and more flexibility in the interpretation of the EU’s budgetary rules. She has offered an EU reinsurance scheme to bolster national insurance schemes for the unemployed which will be an improvement over the current unemployment benefit policy. She is determined to overhaul the EU’s migration policies and foreign policy and has pledged to boost the EU’s border force, Frontex, with 10,000 additional staff by 2024. On the whole she would be presiding over 33,000 people engaged in the Commission’s administration which is a huge responsibility. The EU has had much less gender discrimination and the gender equality index in the member countries is much better than in Asian countries, especially when compared to India. Women were given prominence in politics, style, literature and the arts, by Madame de Pompadour who was a favourite of Louis XV (1715-1774) of France. She was the first to empower women in many ways and was ruling France in political and foreign affairs during her life time. She was involved with the Encyclopedists and befriended Voltaire. Many European women have been in the political and artistic forefront since then. EU member states like Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Slovenia are at the top of the Gender Equality Index rankings. India’s first woman Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is now better placed in negotiating with the EU’s top women officials on important economic issues because the EU is one of India’s biggest trade and investment partners.

• Gender
• International Financial Institutions
• European Union
• Christine Lagarde
• European Central Bank
• Eurozone Crisis
• gender
• IMF
• Ursula von der Leyen

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