INTERVIEW:Sonia Criseo oozes the calm self-assurance of a powerful Parisian – but there's something about the accent of the French finance ministry's deputy 'chef de cabinet' that sounds familiar to RUADHAN MAC CORMAIC,Paris Correspondent
IT’S THE FIRST of those crisp and dazzling spring mornings in Paris. The colours are sharper, the car horns louder, the streets busier. After a dreary few weeks, the light suddenly has the clarity of glass and everything about the city – the tempo, the volume, the sheer vigour of the place – seems to have cranked up a few notches overnight.
As we sit in Sonia Criseo’s office on the sixth floor of the colossal Bercy complex, talking about the city, about politics, about the economy and, above all, about her improbable journey – the au pair who ends up as deputy chef de cabinet at France’s finance ministry – the eye is constantly drawn to the view from the window. It takes in the grassy facade of the Palais Omnisport and then sweeps out over the river towards the south of the city. When we cross the hall to the minister’s office a little later, we have the full panorama, from the soaring black slab of the Montparnasse Tower all the way to Sacré Coeur on the northern hill.
Criseo could probably do without having one of the best views in the city to distract her. She is, among other things, the custodian of one of the busiest diaries in the business, an impossible succession of EU summits, IMF meetings, G8s, G20s, bilaterals, debates, interviews, lunches and briefings. Then there’s the 80-strong cabinet itself to manage, with all the hiring and firing and cajoling and pressing and persuading that involves. She’s also a confidante and friend of Christine Lagarde, France’s finance minister, who is possibly the most powerful woman in the country. The day after we meet, she leaves with Lagarde for Chile, and from there to New York.
“She’s in huge demand,” says Criseo, a youthful 39, over tea in her office, a portrait of President Nicolas Sarkozy watching over us. “We get so many requests for her to intervene, to take part, to co-chair, to be keynote speaker . . . Then she has got to go on trips with the president or prime minister. Yesterday there was a meeting with the Greeks. On Friday that wasn’t known about. So things change extremely quickly.”
Though endlessly warm and engaging, Criseo gives off a sense of calm self-assurance, and has the most blasé way you could imagine of describing high stress. She laughs at the thought. “Well, the thing is, I think if you’re not calm, you can’t do the job. Christine Lagarde is somebody who is very calm . . . There’s no way that I’d let on to Christine Lagarde that I’m stressed about something.”
Criseo has lived in Paris so long that her English is sprinkled with French expressions and syntax, and at first it sounds like the Limerick accent is all but buried under the layers of a 20-year remove, until she starts telling you about her last trip to Davos and comes out with an “ah jeepers, no” and you settle back in your chair, reassured.
Sonia McNamara (as she was) took a fairly conventional route to France. When she was 20, she came here to practise the language and spent nine months as an au pair in Versailles. It was during that first stay that she met her future husband, Dominique, and after returning home for about a year, Criseo decided to come back and try her luck in France.
“At the time, jobs in Ireland were extremely scarce,” she says. “I remember when we were here, I think there were about 20 of us in a group from Limerick . . . It was kind of like an El Dorado, hoping that you’d get a job and that you’d be better paid.”
After a year at a law firm, she applied for a job at another one, Baker McKenzie, as executive assistant to a woman – little known outside legal circles at the time – named Christine Lagarde. They hit it off as soon as they met. For more than a decade, Criseo ran Lagarde’s office in Paris while her boss shuttled across the world. Lagarde was a highly regarded antitrust and labour lawyer, and ascended quickly through the ranks at Baker McKenzie, joining its global board in Chicago in 1995 and becoming the first woman to be elected its chair in 1999.
Criseo remembers once joking to Lagarde that she’d make a good French president. They laughed at the idea – after all, “there was nothing political in her at the time”. Then, out of the blue, one morning in 2005, Criseo took a call from the prime minister’s office. Dominique de Villepin wanted Lagarde to join the government.
The call came on Thursday. They started on Monday. Lagarde’s first job in government was as minister for trade, which she held for two years before – by way of a four-week stint as agriculture minister – becoming minister for the economy, industry and employment, her current title. From her office in Bercy, Criseo has had a ringside seat at the spectacle that has been the rise and rise of Christine Lagarde. Like most of Europe, France sank into recession after the financial crisis set in, and Criseo has vivid memories of those nuits blanches (all-nighters) at Bercy as Lehman Brothers fell and panic gripped finance ministries throughout the world. But the French economy proved more resilient than most, and despite a stubbornly static unemployment rate (traditionally the French economy’s biggest weakness), it was one of the first in Europe to emerge from recession. Many of its ideas about financial regulation are now being imitated by former sceptics.
The face of France’s recovery has been that of Lagarde, the tireless former international synchronised swimmer who became the first female finance minister of a G8 economy and has found herself lauded far and wide for her steady stewardship.
Lagarde can come across as somewhat austere and aloof in public, an impression Criseo insists is at odds with the warm and generous, if demanding, woman she knows. As Criseo remembers it, an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in New York did a lot to change public perceptions of her boss.
“When we got there, we got into the studios and we watched the first part of the programme,” she says. “Of course, I didn’t actually know who Jon Stewart was, though we had reviewed a few of his previous interviews. But it was quite shocking, because every second word they used was an f-word. And I thought: ‘Oh my God, Christine Lagarde never swears. My God,what are we getting her into? This is going to be unbelievable . . . He’s really, really on the ball.’ ”
As it happened, Lagarde played it like a pro. As she sat down beside Stewart, she said: “Bonjour, Jon.” He was visibly thrown by élan, and she was in control. She presented him with a beret and joked about the US finally coming around to France’s way of economic thinking. It was a breeze. Stewart’s closing words were: “Vive Christine Lagarde. Vive la France.”
In a system where proximity to ministers is craved, the close rapport with Lagarde puts Criseo in quite a position. But she admits it can also bring problems. “Working in the cabinet has not always been easy,” she says. “My first two years in the French government were just horrible. I think about three or four times I went to Christine and said: ‘That’s it, I think I’m going to hand in my notice, I’m going.’ ”
Not being a politician, Lagarde didn’t have an entourage to bring with her – it was just her and Criseo, a foreigner who hadn’t been to the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA), the traditional finishing school for the French elite. Criseo remembers going to her first lunch with chefs de cabinet from every government department. The first question around the table was: what year did you graduate from l’ENA? She sensed some jealousy about her relationship with Lagarde, and talks of people “making life difficult” in the beginning.
“Christine Lagarde’s motto is ‘grit your teeth and smile’, and I really had to do it so many times,” Criseo says.
And yet she knows that being a foreigner has also worked to her advantage. For one thing, she can be “more liberal, more unorthodox” than her colleagues, and there’s always a ready explanation: it’s okay, Sonia’s Irish. “I have the grace of God that I’m Irish, and the French love the Irish,” she says. “That helps a huge amount.”
Actually, the desire to retain her Irishness is a theme she brings up a lot. Her children, Toni (14) and Giulia (12), travel to Ireland regularly and are close to her family at home. Her husband, Dominique, is French-Italian, but she likes to say that the kids are “a little bit more Irish than they are French or Italian”. On the wall behind her, to Sarkozy’s right, two photos of Criseo with Bono have pride of place.
Then there’s the attachment to the passport. When she arrived in Bercy, officials told Criseo she’d have to take French citizenship to travel with the minister, but since her first trip on the Irish passport went without a hitch, it hasn’t come up again, and she’s glad.
“I’m so proud of being Irish that, for the moment, it would kill me to fill in the forms where they ask your nationality and write ‘French’,” she says.
Which brings us to the emigrant’s perennial question. “There were times when I thought about it,” she says about a possible return. “The kids are a bit big now, even though the Irish culture is nothing unknown to them. That wouldn’t really be a problem. But I think uprooting them and having them being schooled in Ireland would be a problem. Another problem is that my husband doesn’t speak English.”
She knows how lucky she is when she hears from friends who are locked into 35-year mortgages, and wonders, too, whether the life she remembers in Ireland has been replaced by something that looks much like her own, “both parents working, kids being minded after school, more hustle and bustle, people not having time”.
When we’ve finished the interview, Criseo brings me on a tour of the sixth floor, chatting and laughing about the codes of French politesse, about Thierry Henry, about the changes in Limerick. Lagarde is on a trip to Bordeaux today, but we walk through a reinforced soundproof door marked zone protégée and find ourselves in her office, a large space with a sleek black-and-white carpet and two flags, the French tricolour and the EU’s blue-and-yellow, behind the desk.
Nicolas peers out at us again from another photograph. One of the walls is covered with dozens of framed newspaper cartoons, each one featuring the tall, silver-haired caricature of Madame Lagarde. On the other side, it’s all glass and light. That view again.
It does feel a little odd, poking around the French finance minister’s office like this, chatting about how Limerick is coming along. The same feeling must hit her from time to time. Does she ever sit back and think, this is something? “Very, very often,” she says. “It’s often my dad that I think of. He passed away 12 years ago. He was always happy to see his daughter in France, even though I think it was the first time in my whole life that I saw my dad crying, the day I left Ireland for the first time . . . I’m sure he looks down, winks from time to time and says, ‘keep going’.”
