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Mr. Fernandez, the head of the Treasury within the Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industry, has already been through a similar crisis-management exercise. That came in early August, when Standard & Poor’s cut the top credit rating of the United States government while most of the French elite was on vacation.
Within hours on a summer Saturday morning, Mr. Fernandez helped organize a series of emergency calls with his boss, Finance Minister Fran?ois Baroin, and others in Paris’s circle of policy makers, to prevent the American crisis from sending a financial tsunami across the Atlantic.
Later that day, Mr. Baroin appeared on French television to question the validity of the United States downgrade. President Sarkozy interrupted his vacation in a show of engagement. But behind the scenes, Mr. Fernandez did much of the heavy lifting.
It was not the first time in the two-year-long European crisis that Mr. Fernandez has quietly kept things moving. And it probably will not be the last.
As France and Germany take the lead in trying to hold the euro currency union together, Mr. Fernandez has emerged as one of Paris’s top power brokers — whether in promoting the French position on the banking sector’s participation in a Greek bailout, or the creation of a rescue fund for troubled countries, or the recent deal by most European Union governments to shore up the foundations of the euro zone.
So much confidence has been placed in Mr. Fernandez that the French news media have started calling him the “guardian of the triple-A.”
But Mr. Fernandez, at 44 a youthful technocrat whose soft blue eyes belie an inner sang-froid, chuckles about the moniker with an almost embarrassed air.
“I’m a civil servant,” he said demurely. “I do what I have to do.”
What he must do now could prove crucial to how well France weathers the country’s seemingly inevitable debt downgrade. Because the demotion has been widely telegraphed by the three major credit rating agencies, Mr. Fernandez and other officials do not expect the impact to be devastating.
Still, a lower credit rating will probably make it more expensive for France to service its debt, and more difficult for the Europewide rescue fund — of which France is a major backer — to operate. That, in turn, could renew tensions between France and Germany over how to manage the euro crisis.
For every photo op in which Mr. Sarkozy and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany trumpet a new step forward, Mr. Fernandez has spent countless hours behind the scenes with an influential man in the presidential cabinet, Xavier Musca, Mr. Sarkozy’s powerful chief of staff, and Berlin’s point man, J?rg Asmussen, to smooth and soothe the sometimes testy French-German relationship.
Mr. Fernandez also exchanges e-mails frequently with officials at the Treasury Department to keep up on developments across the Atlantic. And his ability to parse mind-numbing financial issues better than nearly any other French civil servant helped French leaders look smart during the Group of 20 meetings to which France played host in 2011.
Doing all this largely below the public radar is apparently the way Mr. Fernandez prefers to work. In a country where discretion is a highly prized commodity, his effectiveness comes from operating in the shadows.
“Ramon is the right man in the right place,” said Christine Lagarde, who worked with Mr. Fernandez until last summer, when she resigned as France’s finance minister to become the managing director of the International Monetary Fund.
“He is smart, experienced, a good negotiator, but also a critical part of a close-knit network of advisers to the leading political figures,” Ms. Lagarde said.
For Mr. Fernandez’s efforts, he was made a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in December, in a ceremony under the gilded ceilings of the élysée Palace. Mr. Sarkozy cited Mr. Fernandez as a pillar in the management of France’s future.
Yet such moments are rare. Mr. Fernandez generally eschews the elitist trappings embraced by most other government dignitaries.
He rides a motor scooter to work, for example. The idea of being chauffeured around “gives me a headache,” he said. On the scooter, “you take some fresh air, and you are forced to focus on just one thing.”
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