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Support grows for Lagarde IMF bid

French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, who has been on a whirlwind tour touting her credentials to head the International Monetary Fund, has won the backing of Egypt, Indonesia and the UAE.

Published: 13 June 2011 17:45 CEST
Support grows for Lagarde IMF bid

In Cairo, Foreign Minister Nabil al-Arabi announced Egypt’s support for Lagarde, who is running against Mexico’s central bank chief Agustin Carstens and dark horse candidate Stanley Fischer, governor of the Bank of Israel.

“The Egyptian government supports the candidacy of French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde for the post of managing director of the IMF,” the official MENA news agency quoted Arabi as saying, after he met Lagarde in Cairo.

The French minister said she was pleased with the “very affirmative” support she received in the Egyptian capital.

“In this region, I have the honour of being supported by Bahrain, and of having the support of other Arab countries that have expressed themselves,” she told reporters.

The United Arab Emirates also threw its weight behind Lagarde, with Finance Minister Obeid Humaid al-Tayer hailing the French minister’s central role at G20 meetings under the rotating presidency of France.

In Indonesia, Finance Minister Agus Martowardojo backed Lagarde, describing her as a “professional person, very skilful in interacting between organisations, has high integrity and expertise.”

In Cairo, Lagarde said that under her leadership, the IMF would be dedicated to economic development in north Africa and the Middle East, where pro-democracy protests have swept the region.  

She said earlier that she was “confident” of her chances of heading the IMF, while declining to comment on her Israeli rival for the post.

“I am very confident, particularly after several meetings here in Egypt,” Lagarde told reporters after talks with her Egyptian counterpart Samir Radwan. “We have had excellent meetings.”

Egypt is on the 24-member executive board which is due to reach a consensus on naming a new IMF chief at the end of this month.

On Saturday, Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer – an American economist who took Israeli citizenship and previously held the number two post at the IMF – announced that he too was in the race.

Lagarde, who on Saturday was in Saudi Arabia where she also expressed confidence, declined to comment on Fischer’s candidacy, saying only: “He has past experience as the number two at the IMF… Everybody is free to file a candidacy.”

Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz told Israel army radio Fischer’s chances of being elected were “not great.”

“One problem is his age. Fischer is 67, which is two years older than the demands for the position,” Steinitz said.

“I hope they find a way around it, it’s not a suitable criteria in this day and age.”

The IMF’s top post opened unexpectedly after Frenchman Dominique Strauss-Kahn resigned on May 18 to fight sexual assault charges in New York.

Despite a whirlwind world tour that has taken her from Brasilia to Beijing via New Delhi, Lagarde has failed to lock official backing from emerging powers in the race to become managing director of the world’s crisis lender.

Emerging nations have baulked at Europe’s 65-year grip on the top job at the Washington-based institution, calling the arrangement outdated.

Europe has come out in force for Lagarde while the United States and Japan, the IMF’s other power brokers, remain publicly uncommitted.

For members

JOHN LICHFIELD

OPINION: Macron’s attempts to tame world leaders shows he’s more a thinker than a diplomat

French President Emmanuel Macron's flawed efforts to charm the world's autocratic and populist leaders have previously ended in failure or even humiliation. Taking the Chinese president to the Pyrenees won't change that record, writes John Lichfield.

Published: 7 May 2024 12:06 CEST
OPINION: Macron's attempts to tame world leaders shows he's more a thinker than a diplomat

Emmanuel Macron used to fancy himself as a lion-tamer.

There wasn’t a murderous dictator or mendacious populist that the French President would not try to charm: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Narendra Modi, Recep Tayip Erdogan, Victor Orban.

The results, overall, have been poor. Sometimes Macron has been eaten, diplomatically-speaking. Years of trying to smooth-talk Vladimir Putin – with invitations to Versailles and the presidential retreat at Fort Brégancon and the long-table talks in the Kremlin – ended in disillusion and humiliation.

Macron’s attempts to create a blokeish friendship with Boris Johnson ended in cross-Channel exchanges of insults and accusations. His mission to find a core, reasonable Donald Trump ended in the discovery that there was no reasonable Donald Trump, just a self-obsessed, shallow deal-maker or deal-breaker.

And now President Xi Jinping of China. The two presidents and their wives are on an away-day to the French Pyrenees (Tuesday), visiting a region dear to Macron since his childhood.

The first day of Xi’s French state visit in Paris yesterday seems to have produced very little. The Chinese president promised to send no arms to Russia but that is a long-standing promise that he has, technically-speaking, kept.

Xi is reported to have promised to restrict sales to Moscow of “secondary materials” which can be used to make arms. We will see.

The Chinese leader also agreed to support Macron’s call for an “Olympic truce” in Ukraine and elsewhere for the duration of the Paris games in late July and August. Good luck with that.

On the gathering menace of a trade war between the EU and China, no progress was made. As a minimal concession to his French hosts, Xi promised to drop threatened dumping duties on French Cognac and Armagnac sales to China.

Otherwise, Xi said that he could not see a problem. Cheap Chinese-built electric cars and solar panels and steel are swamping the EU market? All the better for the European fight against inflation and global warming.

READ MORE: How ‘Battery Valley’ is changing northern France

Maybe more will be achieved in shirt-sleeves in the Pyrenees today. The Chinese leadership is said to approve of Macron or at least believe that he is useful to them.

Beijing likes the French President’s arguments, renewed in a speech last month, that the EU should become a “strategic” commercial and military power in its own right and not a “vassal” of the United States. The Chinese leadership evidently has no fear of the EU becoming a rival power. It sees Macron’s ideas for a “Europe puissance” as a useful way of dividing the West and weakening the strength of Washington, the dollar and “western values”.

Macron has sometimes encouraged this way of thinking, perhaps accidentally. After his state visit to China last year, he gave a rambling media interview in which he seemed to say that the EU had no interest in being “followers of the US” or defending Taiwan from Chinese aggression. He had to amend his words later.

That was Macron at his worst, an ad-lib, stand-up diplomat who ignores advice from the professionals in the Quai d’Orsay. I would argue, however, that the wider Macron argument – the EU must become more powerful or die – is the French President at his best.

Few other politicians in the world think ahead so much as Macron does. Democratic politics is mired in short-termism. Only autocrats like Xi or Putin can afford to think in terms of decades or centuries.

Macron likes to look around corners. He is often a better thinker than he is a diplomat or practical, daily politician.

His core argument – made in his Sorbonne speech last month and an interview with The Economist – is that Europe faces an unprecedented triple threat to its values, its security and its future prosperity.  

The rise of intolerant populist-nationalism threatens the values and institutions implanted in Europe after World War Two. The aggression of Russia and the detachment of the US (not just Donald Trump) threatens Europe’s security. The abandonment of global rules on fair trade – by Joe Biden’s US as well as Xi’s China – threatens to destroy European industry and sources of prosperity.

READ MORE: OPINION – Macron must earn the role of ’21st-century Churchill’

Civilisations, like people, are mortal, Macron says. Unless the EU and the wider democratic Europe (yes, you post-Brexit Britain) address these problems there is a danger that European civilisation (not just the EU experiment) could die.

Exaggerated? Maybe. But the problems are all real. Macron’s solutions are a powerful European defence alliance within Nato and targeted European protectionism and investment for the industries of the future.

The chances of those things being agreed by in time to make a difference are non-existent to small. In France, as elsewhere, these big “strategic” questions scarcely figure in popular concerns in the European election campaign.

Emmanuel Macron has now been president for seven years. His remaining three years in office will be something between disjointed and paralysed.

It is too early to write his political obituary but the Xi visit and the Sorbonne speech offer the likely main components. Macron will, I fear, be remembered as a visionary thinker and flawed diplomat/politician.

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