PROFILE DOMINIQUE STRAUSS-KAHN:HIS COLLEAGUES might shift in their seats or fidget with a pencil to while away a tedious meeting, but Dominique Strauss-Kahn was known in the halls of Parisian power to discreetly open his electronic chess set, bow his head and quietly resume his latest game. These days, he plays a few hours a night on his iPad, and his wife says it's not uncommon for him to stay up until the early hours pitting his wits against an online opponent in a far corner of the world.
Sitting in the managing director’s office at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington – burnishing his statesman’s credentials as he watches his approval ratings among French voters soar to vertiginous heights – the chess virtuoso in Dominique Strauss-Kahn (or DSK, as he is known) must be marvelling at his own strategic flair.
In the game, they call it a “swindle”: a sequence of moves employed by a losing player to convert his position into a win or a draw. Four years ago, Strauss-Kahn’s moment seemed to have passed. His hope of challenging Nicolas Sarkozy for the presidency had been thwarted by his fellow socialist, Ségolène Royal, and with injured pride he returned to his old job as an economics lecturer. He could do nothing but look on as the dynamic new president swept into the Élysée Palace proclaiming a historic break with the past.
Then came an unexpected approach about the top job at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), followed by a declaration of enthusiastic support for the idea from Sarkozy himself. The president appears to have felt that having a talented Frenchman leading the agency would bring prestige to the country, while his assent would also be a powerful symbol of his vaunted policy of ouverture, or opening up, to political opponents.
Whatever his reasoning, Sarkozy’s supporters hailed the Strauss-Kahn appointment as a tactical masterstroke. In one move, he had co-opted a major left-wing figurehead and dispatched one of his most able rivals safely across the Atlantic. The IMF was mired in a crisis of identity at the time, its authority contested and its relevance in question.
What changed all that was the global economic crisis. As the financial system teetered on the brink of collapse, the IMF suddenly found itself a pivotal player, with more political heft than in decades.
Strauss-Kahn skilfully seized a prominent role for himself, jet-setting to the rescue in Iceland and Pakistan, getting actively involved in the bailout of Greece and helping secure the EU’s $1 trillion rescue package to staunch a larger crisis in the euro zone.
Back home in France, meanwhile, the urbane 61-year-old has become one of the country’s most popular political figures, his approval ratings rising as fast as Sarkozy’s have been falling. Every poll carried out over the past year has placed him as the candidate most likely to defeat Sarkozy in the 2012 presidential election, and the most intriguing current question in French politics is whether or not he intends to declare.
His supporters would say Strauss-Kahn has spent his life preparing for just this moment. Born in Paris in 1949 to middle-class Jewish parents – his father was a lawyer and his Tunisian mother a journalist – Strauss-Kahn was brought up in Agadir, Morocco, before his family left the city in the turmoil that followed the 1960 earthquake, and moved to Monaco.
An academic high-flier, Strauss-Kahn attended two of France’s most prestigious colleges – Hautes Études Commerciales (HEC) and Sciences Po in Paris – before obtaining a PhD in economics and starting his career as a university lecturer. Imbued at home with his parents’ left-wing, secular outlook, he was an active member of the Union of Communist Students, but friends remember him as a theorist more than an activist. He remained at a remove from the May 1968 student protests raging around him in Paris.
Marked out early for his sharp intelligence and strategic nous, Strauss-Kahn moved briskly through the ranks of the Socialist Party (PS), first becoming a member of the Assemblée Nationale, then minister for industry and, finally, the leading light of the so-called “dream team” government assembled by Lionel Jospin in 1997. Flamboyant, charismatic and an excellent debater, Strauss-Kahn has long been seen as the standard-bearer of the PS’s social-democratic wing, which argues for a re-evaluation of old pieties, a reconciliation with business and closer alignment with the European Union. He is a fervent Europhile who speaks fluent English and German and, unlike Sarkozy, supports Turkey’s admission to the union.
As finance minister, he presided over a strong economic recovery, with solid growth and the biggest drop in unemployment in 30 years – achievements that his fans trumpet today. But his term ended abruptly in 1999, when he resigned to defend himself against allegations that he forged documents to extricate himself from a fake job scandal (he was later cleared of all charges).
One of the biggest obstacles standing between Strauss-Kahn and the presidency is his vexed relationship with his own party, which polls show is less enamoured with him than the population at large. The wariness is partly political – many socialists are uneasy with his record of privatisation, not to mention his latest role as a global enforcer of austerity measures – but for some it’s also personal.
How can you be a socialist and own an apartment on the exclusive Place des Vosges in Paris and a riad in Morocco, not to mention having an annual salary of $500,000 (€365,000), asked an interviewer from Paris Match recently. “If I liked money, I would have chosen a different career where I might have made millions,” Strauss-Kahn replied, adding that the remark said more about France’s “complex” about money than his own choices.
A regular subject of lifestyle magazine interviews, Strauss-Kahn is married to the well-known television presenter, Anne Sinclair – his third wife – and has four children.
Sarkozy’s allies have been playing down the chances of Strauss-Kahn’s return. Drawing on some common jibes about the socialist – that he is risk-averse, indecisive and more comfortable at a meeting with Steve Jobs than glad-handing voters at a Sunday-morning market – they insist that Strauss-Kahn doesn’t have it in him to leave the IMF job a year before his term ends and throw himself into another punishing election.
Then there's his reputation as un grand séducteur. In 2008, Strauss-Kahn publicly apologised for "an error of judgment" after having a brief affair with a subordinate at the IMF and denied he had abused his position (the agency's executive board cleared him after an inquiry). A recent biography written by an anonymous former member of his entourage has added, albeit affectionately, to the legend of his womanising.
In France, however, the furore over Strauss-Kahn’s affair at the IMF was widely dismissed as further evidence of the strange sexual puritanism of Americans. Since when have the French been squeamish about the idea of a libidinous president, ask his defenders.
Strauss-Kahn has just a few months to make his decision on the presidency. So far, he has played a smart campaign, remaining aloof from the domestic chatter, while his allies in Paris talk up his position as the “natural candidate” of the left. He went furthest in February, when he said he would consider stepping down early from the IMF job if “certain circumstances” prevailed.
That probably means he will enter the fray only if he is certain to secure the PS nomination, which will be decided by a primary vote among registered members of the public next year. And so Strauss-Kahn faces a strategic choice worthy of the game of kings.
“There are two kinds of challenge to avoid,” he is quoted by a recent biographer. “Those at which one cannot succeed, and those at which one must not fail.”
The clock is ticking. His move.
CV Dominique Strauss-Kahn
Who is he?Managing director of the Washington-based International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Why is he in the news? Opinion polls suggest he is the candidate best placed to defeat Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2012 French presidential election.
Most likely to say?"I am categorically not standing for the French presidency. But only a fool doesn't change his mind."
Least likely to say?"I could have been a monk."
