It’s a Hitchcockian thriller. The scene is set: the closed door of a conclave, nervous breakdowns, annealed hatreds, personal ambitions and quarrels of chapel. Everything is in place so that the outcome of the 53rd CGT congress, which has been held since Monday March 27 in Clermont-Ferrand and which is due to end on Friday with the election of the new general secretary of the Montreuil plant, turns to the confrontation. Who to take up the torch from Philippe Martinez? Who to continue the pursuit of the trade union fight against the pension reform?
Today, everything is open and the script is being written. Philippe Martinez, however, thought he was holding the pen: on May 31, to everyone’s surprise, the CGT leader, at the helm of the confederation since January 2015, announced that he would not run again and pushed the candidacy of a lightweight from the central: Marie Buisson, the general secretary of the Federation of education, research and culture (Ferc). In the process, a vote within the CEC, the confederal executive committee, seemed to endorse the candidacy of this close friend of Philippe Martinez. But soon, things didn’t go as planned. Marie Buisson, very involved in the collective “Never again” where Oxfam and above all a certain number of openly anti-nuclear environmental NGOs point, has quite annoyed the diehards of the power plant who are very attached to the industrial renaissance and to the atom . Result, behind the scenes, for weeks, the anti-Martinez have been polishing their weapons.
Tuesday afternoon, a first skirmish punctuated the congress and illustrates the climate of tension in which the debates are taking place. While the CGT’s activity report – a sort of assessment of the actions of the current management – was to be voted on, the affair, which is theoretically a simple procedure, turned into a psychodrama. Assailed with questions, Catherine Perret, confederal secretary in charge of the pension file and close to Martinez was copiously booed at the podium. “If that’s the CGT, then I’m ashamed,” she says in the hubbub. In the process, the vote takes place and this famous activity report is rejected with 50.32% of the votes against. Unheard of in the history of the plant. “It’s a very worrying sign. It shows that the most radical are ready to go all the way,” blows a delegate close to the Martinez camp.
For the key election of the weekend, everything is possible. Theoretically, the delegates will have to decide on a list of names that will make up the famous CEC. It is within this renewed body that the CCN, the national confederal committee of the CGT – a sort of national assembly of the union – must elect the future boss, who will then designate the executive office in charge of current affairs. In accordance with the statutes, a first name, that of Marie Buisson will be put to the vote. If his candidacy is rejected, only then can a plan B emerge.
Plan B Verzeletti
For weeks, another name has been circulating, that of another woman, Céline Verzeletti, the co-secretary of the Federal Union of State Services. This former prison guard was active in the Young Communists before joining the Communist Party. Member of the current CEC, she is closest to the opponents of the CGT leader. Unlike Philippe Martinez, who for years has defended a form of cordon sanitaire between the CGT and the political parties, she appeared alongside Jean-Luc Mélenchon last fall when the latter organized his march against the high cost of living. . “She says she wants to bring the CGT together, but above all she wants to bring together all the opponents behind her,” breathes a federation official. “She embodies a much more radical vision of the union fight and societal positions, on ecology in particular, take second place behind the mass and class struggle, the historical breviary of the CGT”, adds another source.
How far can this ideological war that runs through the union go? Some even mention the possibility of a split. If outside, the CGT has restored its image by playing the card of the inter-union and the union with the CFDT during the pension conflict, internally, the central Montreuil seems more fragile than ever.