Christine Lagarde

Christine Lagarde (born 1 January 1956 in Paris) is a French lawyer who has held three of the most consequential economic policy posts of the early 21st century. Trained at the Paris Nanterre law faculty and Sciences Po Aix, she joined the US law firm Baker & McKenzie in 1981 and became its global chair in 1999—the first woman to lead the firm.

She entered French government in 2005, serving successively as Minister for Foreign Trade, Minister for Agriculture, and from June 2007 as Minister of the Economy, Finance and Industry under President Nicolas Sarkozy. In that role she helped coordinate France's response to the 2008 global financial crisis and the early eurozone sovereign debt crisis.

In July 2011 Lagarde succeeded Dominique Strauss-Kahn as Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, becoming the first woman to lead the institution. She was reappointed to a second five-year term in 2016. Her IMF tenure was dominated by the Greek bailout programmes, negotiations with Ukraine, and the Fund's evolving stance on inequality and climate risk.

On 1 November 2019 she became President of the European Central Bank, succeeding Mario Draghi, again the first woman in the role. Her presidency has overseen the ECB's pandemic emergency purchase programme (PEPP) launched in March 2020, the 2021 strategy review that adopted a symmetric 2% inflation target, and the aggressive rate-hiking cycle from July 2022 in response to post-pandemic and energy-shock inflation.

Lagarde is not an economist by training, a fact critics sometimes note; supporters emphasise her negotiating skill and political fluency. In December 2016 a French court convicted her of negligence over the 2008 Tapie arbitration while she was finance minister but imposed no penalty. She chairs the ECB's Governing Council and sits on the European Systemic Risk Board.