HONG KONG — With the popularity of Nicolas Sarkozy plummeting in French opinion polls and with Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK) winning a good reputation as head of the International Monetary Fund, speculation is already swirling about when Strauss-Kahn will formally quit the fund to seek glory as president of France. Demands are being made for Strauss-Kahn's successor to break Europe's hegemony over the IMF.
Let the best candidate be chosen irrespective of nationality, professor Barry Eichengreen wrote in this newspaper last month. Ah, naive academics: The demand is both redundant — because leaders of the Group of 20 promised that the next managing director of the IMF and president of the World Bank would be freely chosen regardless of nationality — and pointless, because everyone knows that international "realeconomik" will intrude.
Unless academics, think tanks and senior staff of the IMF can mount a brave, clever and cunning campaign, the prospects are that the big powers, this time including China, will huddle and name some second-rank politician or faceless apparatchik, someone who will recognize the way the world works and won't make waves.