Portuguese Finance Minister Mário Centeno | Stéphanie Lecocq/EPA Eurogroup’s next leader will be Portugal’s Mário Centeno New chief will succeed incumbent President Jeroen Dijsselbloem in January, when the Dutchman’s mandate for the highly influential post ends.

Portugal's Finance Minister Mário Centeno will be the next president of the Eurogroup, after clinching a majority vote from his 18 eurozone peers in Brussels on Monday.

Centeno will succeed the incumbent President Jeroen Dijsselbloem in the new year when the Dutchman's mandate for the highly influential post ends. The term of the Eurogroup presidency is two and a half years.

When he takes over on January 13, Centeno will be the first holder of the post from southern Europe and the first from one of the countries forced into a bailout by the euro crisis. The elevation of the 5o-year-old economist with a Harvard PhD is in part an acknowledgement of Portugal's achievements in putting its economic house in order.

On Centeno’s watch, Portugal has seen unemployment tumble by over half since its 2013 peak to 8.5 percent — below the eurozone average. Growth is forecast at 2.6 percent his year, compared to 0.9 percent in 2014 when the country began to pull out of recession. In May, the European Commission removed Portugal from its excessive deficit blacklist for the first time since 2009.

The Eurogroup is an informal but powerful gathering of 19 eurozone finance ministers, who meet once a month to discuss major economic and monetary policies that cut across the bloc.

The finance ministers of Latvia, Luxembourg, Portugal, and Slovakia all announced their official bids for the presidency on Thursday, sparking surprise and uproar across the eurozone as backroom political deals got underway.

Two major tasks face the new president once he takes over.

Greece is approaching the end of its €86 billion bailout program next summer and the new Eurogroup head will be responsible for overseeing that exit, while handling sensitive talks over debt relief to satisfy demands from the International Monetary Fund.

Centeno will also have the tricky job of developing a common strategy for the future reform of the eurozone's governance, like revamping the EU’s bailout arm and the potential creation of a new budget for the single currency bloc.

Centeno gave a humble acceptance speech, saying that it was “an honor to be the next chair of the Eurogroup” and that he looked forward to working with his peers “to form a consensus” on the eurozone’s future.

The Council announced Centeno’s win following two rounds of voting, which eventually saw he and his counterpart from Luxembourg, Pierre Gramegna, in the final round.

Germany’s acting Finance Minister Peter Altmaier told reporters after the vote that Centeno had won the election “with a great majority,” but the Council said the final vote tally will not be made public.

Latvia’s Dana Reizniece-Ozola withdrew her candidacy after the first round. As the next session of voting was about to start, Gramegna suddenly called for recess so that discussions could be held before the second round. Ministers withdrew for a 25-minute break.

Once they reconvened, Slovakia’s Peter Kažimír announced that he would withdraw from the race without explanation — leaving Gramegna and Centeno as the two final contenders for the coveted position. Kažimír's own socialist camp had already agreed to back Centeno before the Slovak decided to mount a challenge anyway.

Centeno quickly emerged victorious in the final voting.

Portugal’s finance minister still faces one more election. The eurozone’s bailout arm, the European Stability Mechanism, will soon lose Dijsselbloem as chair of its board of governors.

The ESM’s chair is usually the same person as the head of the Eurogroup, but the other finance ministers on the board will still vote on Dijsselbloem’s successor in the coming months.

Klaus Regling, the ESM’s managing director, brushed off any potential upset in this vote and told reporters that he had “no doubt that the result is very easy to foresee.”

Paul Ames contributed reporting from Lisbon.