Medef’s Seillière moves in to grab UNICE top position

By Jerome Glass

Date: 24/03/05

Ernest-Antoine Seillière will succeed Jürgen Strube as the head of the European employers' organisation, UNICE, after an unopposed election this week. Seillière, 67, who is head of the Federation of French Industries (Medef) and chief executive of Wendel Investissement, is a prominent figure in French politics.

His election by an extraordinary meeting of UNICE's council of presidents on Tuesday 22 March means that UNICE has succeeded in finding someone of international stature to follow Strube, the head of German chemicals company BASF.

But UNICE had to backtrack on previous announcements in order to clear the path for Seillière. Strube announced in November that he would not seek to prolong his two-year mandate. In December, at a meeting in The Hague, Strube and the committee of vice-presidents, effectively the executive board of UNICE, announced that Ulysses Kyriacopoulos, the chairman of the Federation of Greek Industries and a UNICE vice-president, was their choice for the presidency.

It seems that there was then a reaction against Kyriacopoulos from some of the national organisations that are members of UNICE. They doubted whether Kyriacopoulos, who heads a small business, had a sufficiently strong international profile.

The Italian employers' federation, Confindustria, resented the imposition of a single candidate as "undemocratic" and put forward its own candidate, Pasquale Pistorio, who has just stepped down as president and chief executive of STMicroelectronics.

When Medef, a highly influential voice in UNICE, put forward Seillière earlier this month, Kyriacopoulos and Pistorio withdrew their candidacies.

Strube, who has been president of UNICE since July 2003, declared himself "very pleased" with the appointment.

"I have come to appreciate Ernest-Antoine as a senior and dynamic businessman who has been of great service to the French business community," he said.

A spokeswoman from the Federation of Greek Industries denied that there was any ill-feeling between the federations and said that Kyriacopoulos "looked forward to working together with Seillière", affirming that he "would continue to play a very important role in UNICE as a vice-president." She admitted, however, that "it was not normally the case" that a candidate who had been endorsed beforehand was replaced by another candidate in the election. A spokeswoman from UNICE declined to comment on the specifics of the electoral procedure.

Seillière studied at the French Ecole Nationale de l'Administration where he was a classmate and friend of Lionel Jospin, later prime minister of France. His full name is Baron Ernest-Antoine Seillière de Laborde. He worked in the cabinets of several foreign ministers before embarking on converting the family-owned Wendel Group from steel-making into an investment company. A member of the "Bilderberg Group" of elder statesmen and businessmen, Seillière was elected head of Medef in December 1997 and is well known in France for his criticism of the 35-hour week, introduced by Jospin's socialist government. He will become the fourth Frenchman to preside over UNICE since the organisation was founded in 1958, and the first since François Perigot's four-year presidency ended in 1998.

As president, Seillière will be responsible for representing the federation to the European institutions and to member states, as well as putting forward the views of industry as part of the "macroeconomic dialogue". His tenure is to begin on 1 July and will last for two years. It is uncertain when he will step down as head of Medef, although his term was due to end in December.

• Primary Source

UNICE: Homepage http://www.businesseurope.eu/

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