Christine Lagarde

Her hobbies are swimming, yoga, making quince jam and tending to her roses

This Tuesday, Christine Lagarde, 55, the former French finance minister, was appointed managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), becoming the first woman to hold the post since its inception in 1944. Meanwhile, the post’s former occupant, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, prepares to face a sexual assault charge raised against him.

On 5 July, she will begin her five-year stint at the helm of an institution ‘demoralised’ by the DSK scandal. First off, though, she’ll need to handle Europe’s incendiary sovereign debt crisis, beginning with Greece, and oversee the disbursement of €100 billion in loans to Greece, Portugal and Ireland.

Lagarde is the former head of the Chicago-based law firm Baker & McKenzie, ‘connected and respected on Wall Street and in Washington as she is in Europe’. What’s significant about this experience is that Lagarde forged her political career through American-style meritocracy, and not the charmed channels through which the French elite do, typified by the prestigious civil services college ENA, which Lagarde had tried and failed, twice, to get into.

As a vegetarian who never drinks alcohol, and whose hobbies are swimming, yoga, making quince jam and tending to her roses in Normandy, Lagarde seems as reassuringly abstemious as the inveterate swinger and  skirt-chaser DSK was libidinous. A woman in charge, she’s said before, could replace testosterone-fuelled competitions of “hairy-chestedness” with “inclusiveness”.

Before all that, though, there’s one tiny thing that Lagarde needs to clear her reputation of: l’affaire Tapie. Lagarde has been accused of ‘abuse of authority’ in a 2007 case which resulted in a lavish payoff of public funds to a tycoon, Bernard Tapie. On 8 July, a special court in Paris will decide whether to launch a probe or dismiss the case.

Christine LagardeFrenchIMF