After six years as head of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde appears to be failing upwards once again. Klaus Schwab, the founder and former head of the World Economic Forum, claimed yesterday that Lagarde has been in talks to take charge of the organisation, thus ending her career at the ECB two years earlier than expected. Although the ECB has said that Lagarde is “committed” to seeing out her term through 2027, the WEF already seems to be setting the stage for her arrival, reserving an apartment for her at its Villa Mundi complex overlooking Lake Geneva.

Having left his role at the WEF last month in the wake of alleged financial misconduct, Schwab has naturally been on the lookout for a full-time successor, and the fact he seems to have settled on Lagarde is no surprise — like attracts like, after all. Lagarde has been a mainstay of the European technocratic blob for years; and despite her incredibly mixed track record throughout her time at both the International Monetary Fund and the ECB, her place atop the continent’s bureaucratic elite and all it represents is what matters most. For Schwab as much as for Lagarde, institutional continuity is the ultimate end of the incestuousness of the European technocratic class, for whom the WEF is its holy grail.

Lagarde’s apparent selection may be an effort to get the WEF to catch up with the times. She has made some headline-grabbing yet largely cosmetic changes at the ECB, incorporating hot-button issues such as climate change research into the bank’s purview. Just a few days ago, she floated the idea of a “global euro moment” in response to the decline of the dollar brought on by Donald Trump’s tariffs. But despite having earned her stripes as an adaptable liberal, Lagarde remains as much of a gatekeeper of the top-down European economic order as Schwab and her ECB predecessor Mario Draghi, and will ensure that the Davos crowd stays happy and unencumbered by the rapid shifts in the world order happening all around them.

Lagarde’s seemingly inevitable move to the WEF will go ahead despite a long history of scandals, poor decisions, and a stunning lack of trust within the organisations she has run. According to a survey last month, 57% of ECB staff have “low or not trust at all” in Lagarde, while her time at the IMF included controversies around economic assistance for Greece, an enormously bloated loan for Argentina that ended up worsening its debt crisis, and a charge of negligence in connection with a payout to a French businessman. A track record like this wouldn’t lend itself to promotions in any other industry. But in the nebulous world which technocrats call home, these are mere footnotes to a career that has very much delivered on its raison d’être.

Even looking past both her failings and her ability to put up a façade of progress, Lagarde’s selection to head the WEF is emblematic of exactly what makes European organisations so intractable, and thus so unpopular among voters across the political spectrum. It reflects the continued instinct by the elites to look to one of their own in moments of turnover, to ensure that attitudes and policies that have been in place for decades — often with little meaningful internal pushback — remain as ironclad as ever.

On a changing continent, though, making room for new ideas is no longer a luxury but a necessity if institutions such as the WEF want to stay relevant. By choosing Lagarde, Schwab and his cadre have shown they are far from ready to rise to the occasion.

---

Michal Kranz is a freelance journalist reporting on politics, society and defence in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. He runs The Eastern Flank, a Substack newsletter focused on Eastern European geopolitics.

Michal_Kranz

---