against all odds, Sophie Binet succeeds Philippe Martinez and becomes the first woman elected to head the union

Coup de theater at the CGT. Sophie Binet was elected general secretary of the union on Friday March 31, succeeding Philippe Martinez. Secretary General of the General Union of Engineers, Executives and Technicians (Ugict)the principal education adviser, born in 1982, becomes the first woman to head the plant.

This election comes at the end of a night of negotiations, during which none of the two candidates hitherto considered, Marie Buisson, the runner-up to outgoing Secretary General Philippe Martinez, and Céline Verzeletti, have not managed to reach a consensus on their name. .

Sophie Binet, secretary general of Ugict, is a member of the confederal executive committee (the extended management of the CGT) where she is responsible for equality issues. She was a referent of the mixed women’s collective, and committed to environmental issues and gender equality. Candidate “by default” according to some, she will have the difficult task of picking up the pieces of a deeply divided CGT. “The sector specific to engineers and executives [qu’elle dirige] was historically in the CGT an entity closer to those who claimed to be reformers within the union, of socialist tendency”, recently explained to franceinfo Karel Yon, sociologist of trade unionism and social movements.