Merkel Coalition Set to Back ECB Alternatives After Weber Exit

(Bloomberg)--German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition parties have turned their back on Bundesbank President Axel Weber, saying they are prepared to accept alternative candidates to head up the European Central Bank.

Two days after his withdrawal as the front-runner to succeed Jean-Claude Trichet, Weber was due in Berlin today as Merkel’s coalition partners pressed her to shift her focus to candidates who will push German goals of fiscal rectitude to boost the euro’s stability.

“It’s about content first and foremost, not the person,” Hans-Peter Friedrich, the parliamentary group leader of Merkel’s CSU Bavarian allies, said in an interview in Berlin yesterday. While the CSU supported Weber, “that doesn’t mean you can’t go for other candidates who have the same stringent policy views.”

Weber’s still-unexplained exit from the ECB race prompted a barrage of negative headlines for Merkel yesterday, 10 days before the start of elections in seven of Germany’s 16 states. The Financial Times Deutschland said Weber’s move was “an affront” to Merkel, while the best-selling Bild newspaper said it was “a blow to the chancellor, and to the euro.”

Weber canceled a planned meeting with French officials that includes German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble scheduled for today. Bundesbank board member Andreas Dombret will take his place at the talks with French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde and French central bank governor Christian Noyer, a Bundesbank spokesman said. The spokesman declined to comment on whether Weber will meet with Merkel.

“What a surprise,” Lagarde told journalists in Paris yesterday about the Weber situation. “I’m dumbfounded.”

Weber’s public criticism of the ECB’s bond-buying program to help stem the sovereign debt crisis may have stoked euro-area resistance to the German’s appointment to the ECB post.

‘It Will Pass’

Merkel, freed of the need to push a Weber candidacy, may be able to turn his departure to her advantage as she pursues her agenda on reshaping Europe to prevent future crises, according to Daniela Schwarzer, a European policy analyst at the Berlin- based German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

“For the German position this is a day of bad news, but it will pass,” Schwarzer said in an interview. “This will go by as long as Germany keeps up its strong negotiating position on the more important things -- the governance mechanisms that have to be put in place in the euro zone.”

While there were “reservations” over Weber’s policy among fellow euro-area governments, “that’s exactly the kind of strict attitude that we see as the right one,” said Hermann Otto Solms, finance and economy spokesman for Merkel’s Free Democratic Party coalition partner.

For all that, the question of ECB succession “has to be separated somewhat from questions of content,” Solms said in an interview. “We don’t have to push through the person, so we can take an even tougher negotiating position on content.”

Trichet’s successor “doesn’t have to be a German,” said Michael Meister, senior finance and economy spokesman for Merkel’s Christian Democrats. “It has to be a good person.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Brian Parkin in Berlin at bparkin@bloomberg.net; Tony Czuczka in Berlin at aczuczka@bloomberg.net