Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the disgraced former French politician and IMF potentate, has emerged from a self-imposed sojourn in the wilderness. And he chose to do so in Moscow of all places.
DSK was once a leading candidate for the French presidency, but his political aspirations were consumed in a blaze of indiscretion, and he spent the last few years fighting legal battles connected to numerous allegations of sexual misconduct.
While trying to fend off jail time, he kept a low public profile. But in late March, with the worst of his legal troubles relating to past misdeeds seemingly over, DSK popped up at the Moscow Economic Forum as a featured speaker. His appearance seemed to catch at least a few other foreign attendees by surprise, as his participation had not been publicized in advance.
In his speech at the forum, Strauss-Kahn echoed a line embraced by the Kremlin – that Western political and economic policies have done harm to Russia and other former Soviet states. He said the IMF, in trying to promote the formation of European-style institutions in transition economies following the collapse of the Soviet Union, did not fully comprehend the complexities of such a task. And without providing concrete examples, Strauss-Kahn inferred that the EU’s neighbourhood policy had failed, in part because of a misguided attempt to impose European culture on other nations. He also endorsed a widely aired opinion at the forum that Russia’s economic revival required a strategy for greater diversification to reduce the country’s dependency on energy exports.
And in a random bit of trivia, there is lots of irony in the fact that in a 2014 fictionalized movie about Strauss-Kahn’s sexual misadventures, titled Welcome to New York, the character supposedly loosely modelled on DSK is played by none other than Gerard Depardieu, the French actor who obtained Russian citizenship from Russian President Vladimir Putin and befriended Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov.
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