On 18 May, the congress of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) elected Bernadette Ségol as the organisation’s general secretary for the next four years. Ségol was born in Luzech, France, in 1949. She was director of Euro-FIET (trade, finance, information technologies and other services) in Brussels between 1985 and 2000. Prior to that, she served as assistant to the general secretary of the International Textile Workers’ Federation, from 1974 to 1985. She has been a member of the ETUC Executive Committee since 1985. Also elected to the new team that will lead the ETUC until 2015 were Józef Niemiec (Poland) and Patrick Itschert (Belgium) as deputy general secretaries; and Claudia Menne (Germany), Luca Visentini (Italy), Veronica Anna-Maria Nilsson (Sweden), Judith Kirton-Darling (United Kingdom) as confederal secretaries. Ignacio Fernández Toxo (Spain) was elected ETUC president.