Juncker, right, with potential successor Pierre Moscovici, France's finance minister
Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg prime minister who heads the eurogroup of finance ministers, set off another round of speculation about his potential successor Monday night when he reiterated that he wanted to step down from the job either by the end of the year or early next year.
Senior officials who should know about leading candidates insist nobody has emerged as a clear front-runner to take over the post, despite Juncker’s Shermanesque declaration. But that hasn’t stopped the guessing game. The criteria are unhelpfully vague. The latest EU treaty basically says that anyone with a pulse can hold the job:
The Ministers of the Member States whose currency is the euro shall elect a president for two and a half years, by a majority of those Member States.
But after two days of gossiping in the halls, here is the sum total of what Brussels Blog has gleaned on the topic, boiled down to three groups of candidates. Read more
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