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Thursday 4 December 2008

Interview: Christine Lagarde

A symbol of change – but is she the real thing?

Matthew Lynn meets France's new finance minister, Christine Lagarde.

But what, I wonder, is in it for her? Sitting in the breakfast room of the palatial finance ministry in the Bercy district — naturally we were meeting for breakfast at eight sharp — Lagarde appears unflappable. She is a tall, thin woman with immaculately cut grey hair, an easy manner and a gentle sense of humour.

She listens with a half-smile when I suggest, politely, that running Northern Rock’s bond-sales operation might be a better job than finance minister of France: less chance of going bust, better paid, and probably a lot easier. You half sense she might well agree.

‘I like challenges,’ she answers, with just a hint of sarcasm. ‘I was working in America, and I was getting very annoyed with the view that France was in decline. And of course it’s very flattering when the prime minister of your country asks if you can help.’

But after running the international activities of a major US law firm, Baker & McKenzie, surely the bureaucracy of a big French ministry must come as something of a shock? ‘It was mind-boggling,’ she replies. ‘Of course, a law firm is a funny beast. It is a fairly political environment as well. But it is different in the details. When I was working on world trade issues, I’d say I’d like to arrange a conference call with the Germans and the Spanish to try and resolve something, but of course it turned out not to be possible to arrange anything like that unless it was all done several days in advance.’

Lagarde is nothing like your typical French mandarin. Married with two sons, she was born in Paris in 1956; she took her undergraduate degree in Le Havre, studied law in Paris then took a masters in political science before further studies in America. After qualifying as a lawyer she joined Baker & McKenzie, specialising in labour and anti-trust law, eventually rising to chairman of its international committee in 1999.

In June 2005 the then French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, asked her to join his government as minister of foreign trade. After Sarkozy won the Presidency, she was briefly minister for agriculture and fisheries; then under the new Prime Minister, François Fillon, she became finance and economy minister.

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