Though nearing his peak, DSK had a vexed relationship with a party uneasy with his lifestyle
DOMINIQUE STRAUSS-KAHN’S political future is imperilled just at the moment when he seemed poised to fulfil a life’s ambition by running as favourite for France’s presidency.
Four years ago, “DSK” retreated from French public life with injured pride after his hope of clinching the Socialist Party’s (PS) nomination for the presidency was thwarted by Ségolène Royal.
His re-emergence as the best-placed candidate to wrest control of the Élysée Palace from the right in 2012 owed a lot to President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to nominate him as managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2007.
When the global financial crisis struck, 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 and helping secure multibillion bailout loans for Greece, Ireland and Portugal.
As the urbane 62-year-old burnished his statesman’s credentials in Washington, he quickly became one of France’s most popular politicians, his approval ratings rising as fast as Sarkozy’s were falling.
It had become increasingly clear that he intended to declare for the socialist primary next month.
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 1960 and moved to Monaco.
An academic high-flier, Strauss-Kahn obtained a PhD in economics and began 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.
Strauss-Kahn moved briskly through the ranks of the PS and was 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. He is a fervent Europhile who speaks fluent English and German.
As finance minister, he presided over a strong economic recovery, 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 obstacles standing between DSK and the presidency was his vexed relationship with his own party, a section of which has always been uneasy with his centrist instincts and famously luxurious lifestyle.
Then there was 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).
His wife Anne Sinclair, a former television presenter, publicly forgave him, while the French public dismissed the row as further evidence of America’s strange sexual puritanism.
It’s unlikely DSK will emerge similarly unscathed this time.
