Dominique Strauss-Kahn Blasts Trump As Too ‘Unpredictable’ For The Presidency

5.11.17

By David Schrieberg
Forbes

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the International Monetary Fund and a man once likely destined to become the president of France until felled by a sex scandal, emerged Sunday in a short interview in which he worried over the state of the planet with Donald Trump as its most powerful figure.

“It’s always delicate for a foreigner to comment on a head of state that is not his own, but I am worried over the way in which the United States elected a man who does not seem to me suited for the job,” he said in a video interview filmed by a French newspaper at a conference in Marrakesh, where he now lives. “I do not believe that is always necessary that a politician have the job…but it is necessary to respect the rules, the codes and the operations of political life that Trump does not. And I believe that this could finish in a dangerous way.”

Agreeing with the suggestion by his interviewer that he’s “a bit pessimistic,” Strauss-Kahn fretted over Trump-induced global uncertainty. “The United States plays a major role in the world,” he said. “Given the importance of the leader of the world, it cannot be in the hands of one so unpredictable.”

Strauss-Kahn himself was once among the most important leaders on the planet. As a globally respected Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund from 2007 to 2011, he was widely seen as the figure most likely to rise to the French presidency. He had a rich background in government and Socialist politics as a former mayor and later, in the 1990s, first as minister of Industry and Foreign Trade and later as Minister of Economy, Finance and Industry.

His fall from grace was spectacular when, in 2011, he was arrested in New York for sexual assault after he allegedly attacked a maid in his Manhattan hotel room and forced her into a sex act. Although charges were eventually dropped due to inconsistencies in the woman’s account, a civil suit was settled for an undisclosed amount.

In a subsequent interview on French TV, Strauss-Kahn – whose wife, a well-known French journalist has since divorced him – conceded that the encounter in the New York hotel had been a mistake but denied he had committed a criminal act.

Since then, Strauss-Kahn has largely disappeared from public view. He appeared on October 8th with current president Emmanuel Macron and his predecessor, François Hollande, at a memorial for a former government minister who died after a fall, raising speculation that he might seek a return to public view, if not public office.

Then, the same month, he was married in Morocco to his fourth wife, Myriam L’Aouffir, a former French television executive who now owns a digital marketing agency.

In the video interview conducted this weekend by the French paper Le Journal du Dimanche during a World Policy Conference in Marrakech, Strauss-Kahn was equally interesting on his views of his country’s unconventional president, Macron, who like Trump achieved his country’s highest office earlier this year primarily as a non-politician – although he did hold a Cabinet position in the Socialist government of his highly unpopular predecessor, Hollande.

In the video interview, Strauss-Kahn was brutal about his party, which finished in fifth place in the April elections, with just over 6% of the vote.

“I believe there is no future for the Socialist Party and that, I believe, is a good thing,” he said of the party he once helped lead. “The time has come to renew the center-left in France.”

Noting that Macron’s election has triggered “a kind of earthquake in French politics,” he said “with sadness” that his Socialist Party hadn’t known how to deal with globalization, that it has failed to transform as the world has transformed and that its moment had passed.

“It is time it disappeared,” he concluded.

Macron, he said “is neither left nor right. He is both left and right.” With Macron, he added, there is an opportunity for both sides of the political spectrum to work together.