Lagarde leaves the ECB: the "freedom to engage" has a price, and a CV

According to franceinfo, Christine Lagarde is set to leave the European Central Bank eight months before the end of her term. She justifies her decision with this sentence: "I want to have the freedom to engage" (our translation). The broadcaster sees in it a revival of speculation about her political ambitions, a few months before the presidential election. What the report does not say: for what, with whom, or whether she will stand. At this stage, everything else is conjecture, including ours.

Let us therefore take the sentence seriously, and not merely as a hint about casting. "The freedom to engage" presupposes that at the ECB, one was not free to do so. This is the central fiction of central banks: independence, that technical neutrality which would make monetary policy a thermometer rather than a choice. Yet a thermometer does not decide who pays for the fever.

Let us recall what this institution actually does. When it raises rates "to fight inflation", the economic press readily writes that "prices demand it" or that "markets are worried". This is the fetishism of the commodity in press-release form: relations between people (firms setting their margins, banks lending, states arbitrating) become forces of nature. Mme Lagarde's departure offers a delightful counterpoint: behind the "neutrality", there is indeed someone, with an agenda, a timetable and perhaps a profession of faith.

The concrete effect of these rates is less mysterious. Dearer credit cools investment, then employment. The unemployment that results rebuilds what Marx called the reserve army: a pool of jobless or precarious workers that restrains the wage demands of those still in work. Whether we like it or not, "cooling the labour market" is a polite way of rebalancing the share between wages and profits. Workers learn this at their own expense, rarely through a press release.

A central banker who says she is ready to "engage" therefore does not invent the link between money and politics; she makes it visible. The move from managing credit to electoral competition is not a rupture but a change of lectern: those who administer value at the summit of the financial system are close, socially and ideologically, to those who govern. This reading remains ours: nothing in the report establishes that Mme Lagarde would serve this or that interest or camp.

Finally, there is an irony of timing. For years we have been told that the ECB must stay out of partisan play, so as not to yield to pressure. That it can be left eight months before its term ends, in the name of a commitment yet to come, reminds us that this distance is above all a matter of presentation.

What we do not yet know weighs heavily: the nature of the commitment, her possible successor, the political sequel. What we do know is enough to pose the useful question: the independence of the central bank, independent of whom, exactly?