Draghi says he needs to explain plan Europe's master forger, slayer of the once mighty Bundesbank and chairman of the Fed in Frankfurt is now ready to take on the political representatives of the German people. None of those epithets would be accepted as remotely fair by either the European Central Bank or a neutral observer, but they would all be recognised as alluding to the bank's president, Mario Draghi, who on Friday launched his sunshine policy to overcome deep German hostility to his plan to save the euro, and, in doing so, launched himself further into politics. The 65-year-old Italian, who pledged in July to do "whatever it takes" to save the single currency, used a German newspaper interview to put himself at the disposal of the Bundestag in Berlin in order to explain his plan - an offer almost immediately taken up by parliamentary leaders. "I need to do more to explain our measures," Mr Draghi told the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Appearing before parliament "would be a good opportunity to explain what we're doing." The bank's outright monetary transactions, or OMT, programme offers to make unlimited purchases on secondary markets of a country's sovereign bonds with a maturity of less than three years. This would bring down the unsustainably high borrowing rates paid by countries such as Spain and Italy, which have risen to reflect the risk of a break-up of the euro. The problem, identified by a Germanic coalition ranging from the Bundesbank to the mass market daily Bild Zeitung, is that this sounds like in effect printing money to bail out wayward economies and, they suggest, strays beyond the ECB's mandate. Unlike the Federal Reserve, which is meant to ensure full employment and combat inflation, the ECB's sole purpose in life - like the Bundesbank's before it - is "price stability" or keeping inflation in check. Mr Draghi has answers to these criticisms. OMT is monetary policy, he says, because its purpose is to fix the broken "transmission mechanism" by which rates set in Frankfurt affect the price of a corporate loan in Bologna. And it comes with strings attached to guard against political backsliding on austerity and structural reforms. He has the support of Angela Merkel, chancellor, but the wider political and public reception has been mostly negative. "The Germans think that purchasing bonds is the same as creating inflation, which is a very abbreviated view of how monetary policy works," Holger Schmieding, an economist at Berenberg Bank who supports OMT, said. The ECB needs to explain this. Mr Schmieding said it was hard to see how Mr Draghi could win over the readers of Bild Zeitung, but he stood a significant chance of swaying those in the Bundestag who had voted in favour of the eurozone's rescue funds. A date has yet to be set for Mr Draghi's appearance before either the budget committee or the European affairs committee of the Bundestag, both of whom said they would invite him. The questioning is likely to be tough, although, disappointingly for fans of robust debate, the conservative politician, Alexander Dobrindt, who dubbed Mr Draghi a "forger" even before his plan was published, sits on neither committee. It will be Mr Draghi's first such appearance. Although the ECB chief does regularly testify before the European Parliament, the bank jealously guards its independence, as does the Bundesbank, which was the sole voice of dissent on the ECB's rate-setting governing council over OMT. Asked in the interview why he never wanted to a be a politician himself, Mr Draghi, who spent a decade as head of the Italian Treasury as politicians came and went, said: "Because it's best for one to do the things that one enjoys doing."