After the warm-up lap, the race for the presidency of Medef will finally be able to begin. The candidates completed their collection of sponsorships on Friday and their file will be studied on Tuesday by the Statutory and Ethics Committee of the Medef for validation. Once this last step has been taken, the official campaign will begin and the new boss of bosses, who will succeed Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, will be appointed on July 6.
According to information released by BFM Business, and confirmed by Le Point, only three of them have passed the first stage: Patrick Martin, the current deputy president of Medef and right arm of Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, Dominique Carlac’h, vice-president and spokesperson for the Medef, and Pierre Brajeux, the delegate president of the French Federation of Security. Guillaume Cairou, president of the Entrepreneurs Club, failed to pass the bar of 150 sponsorships, while Olivier Klotz, president of Medef Alsace, had already thrown in the towel and rallied Pierre Brajeux.
Will the battle be close as was the clash between Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux and Alexandre Saubot in 2018? For the moment, the bookmakers are still betting on an easy victory for Patrick Martin. Boss of a family ETI, Martin Belaysoud, specializing in the distribution of products and services for construction and industry, the current number two of Medef and heir to Roux de Bézieux, is the big favorite.
“It’s been five years since he toured the territorial Medefs and federations and that’s what counts for this election: the members want to have the president’s cell phone and have already patted him on the back”, decrypts a former the House. Patrick Martin has already received the support of a weighty federation, the Union of Metallurgical Industries and Trades (UIMM), and that “in a personal capacity”, of Olivier Salleron, the boss of the French Building Federation.
But he can be wary of Dominique Carlac’h. The former 400m champion knows very well that victory can only be achieved in the home stretch and relies on her fine knowledge of the internal mechanics to catch the favorite. Director of consulting firm D
The outsider and rugby player Pierre Brajeux, president of Torann, a security company, wants to embody “a change of course”, and places himself in the right line of a Pierre Gattaz and his “Combat Medef”.
Can these two turn things around? Even if the gap still seems significant today between the first in the race and his two challengers, “it is not always the favorite who wins”, slips a senior executive of the Medef, a way of reminding that he does not must not rest on its laurels. The absence of Patrick Martin, who was replaced by Samuel Tual, president of the Medef Pays de la Loire, during a debate organized by the employers’ organization Ethic, was indeed not the best perceived by the members. See you in two months!
