By Alexandra Schwarz-Goerlich
VIENNA (Reuters) -Austria’s ruling coalition of conservatives and Greens has nominated Economy Minister Martin Kocher to take over as governor of the Austrian National Bank next year, the government said on Tuesday.
Kocher will succeed Robert Holzmann when his six-year term as governor expires on Sept. 1 next year. That will put Kocher into the European Central Bank’s Governing Council.
Kocher’s nomination must be approved by Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen, which is expected to be a formality.
Kocher, 50, had long been the favourite for the nomination, and said in a statement he would do the job “with the utmost care and an ongoing clear focus on objectivity, independence and transparency” if confirmed as governor.
The 75-year-old Holzmann, an outspoken hawk at the ECB, had said he would not seek re-appointment.
Kocher, an economist who specialised in behavioural economics, left academia to join the current coalition government in 2021 as a conservative, first serving as labour minister and then taking on the economy portfolio in 2022.
Having headed the IHS economic think tank before he switched to politics, Kocher was already familiar to the public as an economic expert. He has kept a relatively low-key, centrist and technical profile as minister.
He is widely known to be a marathon runner but has given away little about his views on monetary policy, or what kind of bank governor he would be. As minister, he has said there is only so much national governments can do to address inflation and that it is largely the ECB’s task.
(Reporting by Alexandra Schwarz-Goerlich and Francois Murphy; writing by Tom Sims and Dave Graham; editing by Thomas Seythal and Jonathan Oatis)
