In Toronto Next Month at the G20 Meeting: Dominique Strauss-Kahn

No one can tell whether the $1 trillion bailout to Greece will work. But for the moment the man at the centre of it, the head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn (pictured here with his wife, Anne Sinclair), is smiling and one hopes he will still be smiling a month from now. One may be sure that the matter of the global bank levy, on which he and his Toronto host, Canada’s prime minister Stephen Harper, are on opposite sides, will not remove the smile even for a minute. Le grand séducteur, as he is called by his admirers, will know how to charm him.

One can get a whiff of his charm watching his interview last year with Charlie Rose – still available online – in which he correctly predicted the 2010 recovery and explained why it was essential to give priority to bailing out the financial sector. There can be no recovery from the crisis, he said, unless the banks are enabled to make loans again, and this had to be done on a global scale since this crisis was the first in human history that was global. Before this one, he said, we had an Asian crisis, and a Latin American crisis, and so on. But never before have we had a crisis affecting the entire globe.

All this is remarkable since as a student in the late ’sixties – he was born in 1949 – Dominique Strauss-Kahn was an activist member of the Union of Communist Students and in November 2006 tried to become the socialist candidate for the presidential election but was defeated by Ségolène Royal. Already under the socialist President Mitterrand the party had moved towards the centre, towards a more open economy.

For some years he led the think tank À gauche en Europe, which he created with Michel Rocard and Pierre Moscovici. He was also president of Socialisme et Démocratie, a group within the Socialist Party.

Those who recently saw a photograph of Gordon Brown, who is two years younger, as an earnest, pale, long-haired student leader in the sixties will recognize a similar pattern from left to the centre. But no one ever called Gordon Brown le grand séducteur.

When Brown went to Davos, the annual gathering in the Swiss Alps of the world’s leading thinkers about the economic state of the world, he no doubt always behaved properly, unlike DSK – everyone in France knows him by his initials – who last year had a fling with the blond Hungarian-born IMF staffer Piroska Nagy, whose husband was not amused and made a fuss. Not only that, but DSK was also accused of giving her preferential treatment when she found it advisable to leave the IMF. But after an investigation, DSK was exonerated and apologized for the affair and his wife, the French television personality Anne Sinclair, told the press they “were moving on.” It seems she was not amused either but forgave him.

In 1999 there had been two more serious scandals involving him from which he also bounced back. As finance minister he had been accused of corruption. During the investigation he resigned. He was cleared and won back his parliamentary seat.

Whether DSK will have a fling in Toronto no one can predict. He will have little time, and security, as we all know, is heavy.

Nor can one predict whether in 2012 he will seek the nomination for the Socialist presidential candidacy again, to challenge Nicholas Sarkozy, the leader of a centre-right party.

He probably will.

And Le grand séducteur may very well become the next president of France.