The union representing European Central Bank employees says most of them do not believe the institution’s current president, Christine Lagarde, is the right person to lead Europe’s most important bank, Reuters reported.

A survey published on Monday by the trade union IPSO (International and European Public Services Organization) shows that the confidence of ECB employees in the management of the institution is lower than a year ago, with almost 60% of respondents expressing a negative opinion about it. .

The survey, which coincided with the midpoint of Lagarde’s eight-year tenure as ECB president, found that most ECB staff were mainly concerned about topics such as pay and working conditions.

But IPSO said more than half of those polled expressed some doubt about Lagarde’s success in tackling inflation, the ECB’s main goal.

Last September, the ECB raised key interest rates for the euro zone to the highest level since the introduction of the single currency in 1999, in a bid to regain control of inflation after it soared in many European countries due to problems caused by COVID-19. 19 pandemic and war in Ukraine.

Lagarde was appointed to lead the ECB without experience as a central bank head

Some 53.5% of those polled by IPSO said they thought Lagarde, a former head of the IMF, was not the right ECB president at the moment. Only 22.8% rated it positively, and 23.8% were undecided.

IPSO noted that this is the first time ECB staff have come to such a conclusion regarding a bank manager. Although he was managing director of the IMF from 2011 to 2019 and previously held several portfolios in the French government, including economy and finance, Lagarde had no experience as a central bank chief at the time of her appointment to lead the ECB in 2019.

Employee complaints were also constant during the mandates of Lagarde’s predecessors, Mario Draghi and Jean-Claude Trichet, but they always positively evaluated their work at the head of the institution.

However, only Lagarde during her tenure faced a period of sustained high inflation at the global level, which also affected the standard of living of ECB staff.

The ECB and trade union representatives are at loggerheads over the polls

An ECB official said on Monday that the IPSO survey was “flawed” and included questions about topics that are the responsibility of the ECB’s Board of Directors or the Board of Governors, not just the bank’s president.

But the survey also found that 59% of respondents rated their trust in the ECB’s Governing Council as “absent” or “low”, up from 40% last year.

On the other hand, the ECB management claims that IPSO allowed one person to fill out the questionnaires for the survey more than once, criticizing other previous surveys by the union.

An ECB representative recalled the institution’s own surveys, saying that an average of 3,000 employees responded to them out of a total of approximately 3,500.

In one of these internal ECB surveys in 2022, almost 83% of respondents said they were “proud” of their workplace, and a further 72% said they would recommend it to others.