Washington--Christine Lagarde has crossed the Atlantic to swap her job as a French minister for a place in the global economic elite at the head of the International Monetary Fund.
But she has never been able to leave behind one extreme headache: Greece.
In Washington as in Paris, the meteoric career of the 59-year-old lawyer has repeatedly been waylaid by Athens and its financial troubles.
And the Greek crisis is coming to a head just as Lagarde weighs whether to renew her position next year as managing director of the IMF.
When the first rescue plan for Greece was crafted by the IMF and European union in 2010, Lagarde's star was already high, as France's first female economy minister.
In that job she was constantly tied down by the problems of Greece and the other troubled countries of the European periphery.
Then in July 2011, after Dominique Strauss-Kahn was forced out as IMF managing director in a sex scandal, Lagarde was chosen to take charge of the crisis bank.
The move gave her a powerful seat inside the closed circle of the world's leaders, but also responsibility for what proved to be an intractable crisis that threatened the whole European economy.
Less than a year after her arrival, the initial rescue plan for Greece crumbled and the IMF was forced to join an expanded second bailout operation, taking the bailout cost to a massive 240 billion euros ($270 billion).
Yet Greece kept bleeding, and now even that plan has proven inadequate. For months Lagarde has been locked into crunch talks for extending the bailout. If they fail, Greece could default on its IMF loans and possibly make a disastrous exit from the eurozone.
The crisis keeps her intimately wrapped up in the heart of European affairs.
"She knows by heart the situation in Brussels and everyone there knows her by heart," said a person close to her.
AFP
