Martine Aubry was on the defensive on Monday after Sunday night's interview with Dominique Strauss-Kahn brought to light a "pact" the two had made that suggested only one would stand for the presidential nomination.

"/> Martine Aubry was on the defensive on Monday after Sunday night's interview with Dominique Strauss-Kahn brought to light a "pact" the two had made that suggested only one would stand for the presidential nomination.

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DOMINIQUE STRAUSS-KAHN

Aubry fights back over ‘default candidate’ charge

Martine Aubry was on the defensive on Monday after Sunday night's interview with Dominique Strauss-Kahn brought to light a "pact" the two had made that suggested only one would stand for the presidential nomination.

Published: 20 September 2011 10:33 CEST
Aubry fights back over 'default candidate' charge
Marie-Lan Nguyen (file)

Aubry was the last of the six candidates to announce she would stand in the election to choose the Socialist party’s candidate for the 2012 presidential election. She finally entered the race on June 28th.

In Sunday night’s interview, watched by a record 13.5 million people, Strauss-Kahn was asked whether he had hoped to stand for the presidency and whether there had been a pact with Aubry, who was recently first secretary of the Socialist party until she stepped aside to run for the nomination.

“Yes, I wanted to be the candidate,” he said. Referring to Aubry, he acknowledged “we had, in effect, a pact.”

Before rape charges were brought and later dropped against the former IMF director in May, Strauss-Kahn was the clear favourite in opinion polls to win the Socialist nomination.

Since announcing she is to run, Aubry, who is also the mayor of the northern town of Lille, is currently second placed in opinion polls, behind the front-runner François Hollande.

Hollande’s supporters were quick to exploit Strauss-Kahn’s mention of the pact on Monday.

“If Martine Aubry is a candidate today, it’s because DSK isn’t,” said Socialist member of parliament André Vallini. “François Hollande, who has never been in any pact or any arrangement, is not a candidate by default or substitution.”

On the right, Bernard Debré, an MP with the governing UMP party, also called Aubry the “default candidate” in an interview on BFMTV-RMC.

Aubry’s own campaign team hit back at the accusations.

“Before May 14th, DSK wanted to be a candidate, Martine wanted to be a candidate,” François Lamy, one of Aubry’s key supporters, told AFP.

“They were going to decide together in June. Each had their own constraints, him at the IMF and she as the head of the party. It doesn’t mean she was going to give up her place to him.”

Late on Monday, Aubry herself finally reacted to her Strauss-Kahn’s comments. Speaking to journalists on a trip to Nice, she asked: “do I look like a substitute candidate?”

“If you define a pact as ‘have you worked together?’, the answer is yes,” she said. “If it’s whether a decision had been taken, then it’s no. I am not the candidate by default but the candidate we need.”

François Hollande will get further encouragement from a poll to be published in news magazine Le Point this week. The poll, by IPSOS, puts him as the most liked politician in France, with a score of 54 percent of positive opinions. This puts him ahead of the next two favourites, former finance minister and current IMF head Christine Lagarde (51 percent) and the Socialist mayor of Paris Bertrand Delanoë (49%).

Voting in the Socialist primaries takes place in two stages. The first vote will be on October 9th. The two leading candidates from that will then face each other in a final vote on October 16th.

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ECONOMY

World unprepared for next financial crisis: ex-IMF chief Strauss-Kahn

The world is less well equipped to manage a major financial crisis today than it was a decade ago, according to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former chief of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Published: 9 September 2018 14:08 CEST
World unprepared for next financial crisis: ex-IMF chief Strauss-Kahn
Former French Economy Minister and former managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Dominique Strauss-Kahn , poses during a photo session in Paris on Thursday. Photo: JOEL SAGET / AFP
In an interview with AFP, the now-disgraced Strauss-Kahn — who ran the fund at the height of the 2008 financial meltdown — also said rising populism across the world is a direct result of the crisis. 
 
Strauss-Kahn resigned as head of the IMF in 2011 after being accused of attempted rape in New York, although the charges were later dropped. He settled a subsequent civil suit, reportedly with more than $1.5 million.
 
Q: When did you become aware that a big crisis was brewing?
 
A: When I joined the IMF on Nov 1, 2007, it became clear quite quickly that things were not going well. That is why in January 2008, in Davos, I made a statement that made a bit of noise, asking for a global stimulus package worth two percent of each country's GDP. In April 2008, during the IMF's spring meetings, we released the figure of $1,000 billion that banks needed for their recapitalisation.
 
Q: Did the Bush administration grasp the danger of Lehman Brothers going bankrupt?
 
A: No, and that is why Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson decided not to save Lehman, because he wanted to make an example of it in the name of moral hazard. Like everybody else, he considerably underestimated the consequences. Allowing Lehman to go under was a serious mistake. Especially because only a week later they were forced to save the insurer AIG, which was much bigger.
 
Q: Ten years on, are we better equipped to deal with a crisis of such a magnitude?
 
A: No. We have made some progress, particularly in the area of banks' capital adequacy ratios. But that is not nearly enough. Imagine Deutsche Bank suddenly finding itself in difficulty. The eight percent of capital it has at its disposal are not going to be enough to solve the problem. The truth is that we are less well prepared now. Regulations are insufficient.
 
Q: How so?
 
A: After 2012-2013 we stopped talking about the need to regulate the economy, for example concerning the size of banks, or concerning rating agencies. We backtracked, which is why I am pessimistic about our preparedness. We have a non-thinking attitude towards globalisation and that does not yield positive results.
 
Q: Do we still have international coordination?
 
A: Coordination is mostly gone. Nobody plays that role anymore. Not the IMF and not the EU, and the United States president's policies are not helping. As a result, the mechanism that was created at the G20, which was very helpful because it involved emerging countries, has fallen apart. Ten years ago, governments accepted leaving that role to the IMF. I'm not sure it is able to play it today, but the future will tell.
 
Q: Do you believe that Donald Trump's election is a consequence of the crisis?
 
A: I believe so. I'm not saying that there was a single reason for Trump's election, but today's political situation is not unconnected to the crisis we lived through, both in the US with Trump and in Europe.
 
Q: Connected how?
 
A: One of the consequences of the crisis has been completely underestimated, in my opinion: the populism that is appearing everywhere is the direct outcome of the crisis and of the way that it was handled after 2011/2012, by favouring solutions that were going to increase inequalities.
 
Quantitative easing (by which central banks inject liquidity into the banking system) was useful and welcome. But it is a policy that is basically designed to bail out the financial system, and therefore serves the richest people on the planet.
 
When there's a fire, firemen intervene and there is water everywhere. But then you need to mop up, which we didn't do. And because this water flowed into the pockets of some, and not of everyone, there was a surge in inequality.
 
By AFP's Antonio Rodriguez