Mehdi Tazi and Mohamed Bachiri were elected President and Executive Vice-President of Morocco’s Confederation of Enterprises (CGEM) on Thursday evening with 91.5 percent of votes cast at the federation’s elective general assembly, held in a large venue at a Casablanca hotel before the who’s-who of Morocco’s business world. Of 4,123 votes counted, 3,773 went to the sole candidacy — a result that reflects both the strength of the consensus built ahead of the vote and the absence of any rival ticket, though it also incorporates a meaningful dissenting margin of roughly 8.5 percent.
In his acceptance address, Tazi committed to taking the CGEM “to a new level,” creating the conditions for Morocco’s private sector to unleash its energy and strengthen its confidence. He placed particular emphasis on three underrepresented constituencies that the new leadership intends to actively engage: youth, women, and Moroccans of the diaspora — a framing that signals a deliberate effort to broaden the federation’s social base beyond established enterprise leadership.
The five-axis program the tandem presented ahead of the vote covers: a business environment overhaul centered on administrative simplification, labor code reform, and local tax rationalization; productive sovereignty, with a target of 70 percent local content in strategic sectors and the creation of new industrial ecosystems, beginning with machine tools; innovation, including the Morocco Innovation Lab, deeper adoption of artificial intelligence, and accelerated digitalization of SMEs; international reach, with reinforced export competitiveness, ESG standards alignment, and diaspora mobilisation; and internal CGEM cohesion through stronger cross-federation and cross-regional collaboration.
Tazi’s immediate priorities for the opening weeks of the mandate will be the professional training reform legislation already tabled by the government, and the management of supply chain disruptions and input cost pressures stemming from the Middle East conflict. Both are live issues for Moroccan enterprises and offer the new CGEM leadership an early opportunity to demonstrate its value-added as a policy interlocutor.
The transition marks the end of Chakib Alj’s six-year presidency, during which Tazi served as Executive Vice-President and co-architect of the federation’s positioning as a substantive economic policy voice. Bachiri, who comes from the automotive sector as Director General of Renault Maroc, brings private sector operational credibility in one of Morocco’s highest-profile industrial relationships. The assembly also confirmed a new Board of Directors whose composition reflected an effort to diversify regional and sectoral representation.
