In "S'engager", Marylise Léon looks back on the journey that led her to the head of the CFDT

Nothing predestined Marylise Léon to take up the defense of workers. Coming from a family in Finistère in which unionism was a terra incognita , she joined the French Democratic Confederation of Labor (CFDT) "late" , at the age of 26, thanks to complicity forged at the beginning of her professional life, when she was responsible for safety and the environment within a consulting firm. This is what she recounts in S'engager . The book allows us to better understand the springs that propelled her, on June 21, 2023, to the head of the first employee organization in France. It is both an instructive self-portrait and an illuminating reflection on the CFDT central union, its doctrine, and its projects.

One of the striking points in Marylise Léon's rise is that she didn't seem to have to push for it: comrades above her pushed her to the top. Having become number two in 2018, she climbed to the top step five years later, having been put into orbit by the then leader, Laurent Berger, her "friend" , with whom she formed a "real partnership" .

Now affiliated with the "club of general secretaries", she cites two of her predecessors as references: Edmond Maire, the architect of the refocusing of the CFDT from the end of the 1970s, and Nicole Notat, a divisive figure due, in particular, to the support she gave to the Juppé plan for Social Security in 1995.

A feminist, a "fervent European" and very attached to the cause of ecology, Marylise Léon expresses, in an entire chapter, her visceral hatred of far-right ideas. Faced with this "danger" , she says she has an identical vision to that of Sophie Binet, her counterpart at the CGT, whom she describes, in passing, in positive terms, which deserves to be underlined given the bitter rivalry between their two organizations.

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