"His chances have improved but it's not in the bag yet," Marco Valli, an economist at Italian banking giant UniCredit, told AFP, as the Jesuit-educated economist stepped up his campaign to take the top post in Frankfurt.

A columnist for the Financial Times daily was bullish this week, saying "The ECB needs Draghi." And The Economist said: "The next president of the world's second-most-important central bank should be Mario Draghi."

The likelihood of seeing a German at the helm of the ECB seems slim-to-none after Weber said he was stepping down as president of the German central bank, to be replaced by Jens Weidmann, economic adviser to Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Other candidates mooted recently are Germany's Klaus Regling, who chairs the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), the head of Luxembourg's central bank Yves Mersch and Erkki Liikanen of the Bank of Finland.