Heavy rain pummeled the canopy over the covered stage in Paris’s Roland-Garros stadium on Thursday night, midway through the first debate for next spring’s French presidential election.

The seven candidates present, who included Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Marine Le Pen, Édouard Philippe, Gabriel Attal, Raphaël Glucksmann, and Marine Tondelier, volleyed competing economic visions in front of a buttoned-up crowd of entrepreneurs and business leaders attending the Movement of French Businesses’ (Medef) summer conference.

There was plenty on stage for Medef corporate chiefs to cheer for. The pro-business, deregulation-happy employers’ union has already enjoyed a long string of political wins since its founding in 1998. Whoever the president has been, Medef’s priorities have consistently been carried out, as France’s postwar social democratic compromise has been worn down by decades of austerity and capitalist logic.