Do we like them?

Do we like Christine Lagarde?

Our score: 7 out of 10. Clean on the harm test and a long record of backing women's economic participation, but a 2016 negligence conviction and a staff-and-pay row keep her off the top shelf.

Christine Lagarde is the rare person who has run a global law firm, a French economy ministry, the IMF and now the European Central Bank. She was France's trade minister, then agriculture minister, then finance minister from 2007 to 2011, before taking the IMF's top job. She became the ECB's first woman president in 2019, so she's no stranger to being the first woman in the room.

The black mark is the Tapie affair. In December 2016 France's Court of Justice of the Republic found her guilty of negligence for not challenging a 2008 state payout to businessman Bernard Tapie, which she'd approved as finance minister. No sentence was passed, and she didn't appeal. It's a real stain, but a negligence ruling with no penalty is a long way from the embezzlement claims that still float around online.

On the harm test she's clean as far as the reporting goes. She has argued for years that women's economic participation matters: on US TV in 2018 she said equal participation would lift GDP by 5 percent, a claim PolitiFact rated half-true. In a 2020 ECB interview she credited women with much of the behind-the-scenes work on the Paris Agreement. I found nothing from her on LGBTQ+ rights either way, so that's a gap, not a tick.

Conspiracy-land has made a hobby of her. Euronews fact-checkers found a viral clip claiming she wanted to scrap cash for the climate was misleading, as she never suggested eliminating cash altogether. Fake quotes aimed at her aren't her fault, so they don't count against her.

The ECB has been messier. In a 2024 union poll, staff described her as “autocratic”, and most rated her performance poor or very poor, according to the Telegraph; the ECB called that survey flawed. This February she also disclosed receiving about 130,000 Swiss francs from the Bank for International Settlements, which drew criticism given the ECB's limits on extra pay.

The good stuff is a career spent in public service, plus recognition like the honorary degree the London School of Economics gave her in 2022 for service in economic policymaking. She's not a saint, and some critics still blame her IMF years for how Greece was handled, but there's no pattern of cruelty or grievance politics here.