Therefore Ms Lagarde ran a huge law firm in the US. Doesn’t that sound much better than Martin Schulz, a socialist who was before becoming Member of the European Parliament somewhere in the nineties a librarian and the mayor of a small German village and is at the moment President of the (‘dysfunctional’ as the Economist called it) European Parliament? Or also much better than Guy Verhofstadt, a Belgian former liberal prime minister and at the moment leader of the EP liberals, a super-federalist dreaming of the United States of Europe governed from the ivory tower in Brussels and with member states stripped of their democratic powers?
Ms Lagarde is a member of the French UMP, belonging to the EPP political family. This centre-right European People Party is likely to remain the biggest group in the EP after the elections in May and will certainly claim the Commission Presidency. With Ms Lagarde, the EPP can get round the difficulty that it otherwise has to choose for Juncker. After being Prime-Minister of Luxemburg for 12 years he lost this function in the recent national elections. He was also many years chairman of the Eurozone finance ministers meetings but stepped down last year.
The Economist wrote last week: ‘If the EU were a company, its board would have been sacked; if it were a football team, it would have been relegated. It needs new leadership’. Christine Lagarde can be the change. But she needs in the first place the support of EU’s main-leaders Francois Hollande, David Cameron and … Angela Merkel!
By: N. Peter Kramer
