Deputy Aymeric Caron’s bill to ban bullfighting will be on the menu of the LFI parliamentary “niche” of November 24, a day reserved for draft evaders to present texts to the Assembly, AFP learned from parliamentary sources on Friday.
Its examination in the hemicycle is however not guaranteed and will depend on the order in which the disobedient group presents its legislative proposals. But the text against bullfighting will be “at least examined in committee” beforehand, it is underlined on the side of LFI.
Unlikely to succeed
The ex-journalist Aymeric Caron, committed to the animal cause, had already announced the date of November 24 on social networks, but it had not been confirmed until then. Deputy LFI of Paris, Aymeric Caron intends to “eliminate bullfighting” and “cockfighting”, “all animal shows with abuse, ill-treatment and killing”.
The parliamentarian would like to modify the Penal Code which already punishes animal abuse, but whose provisions of article 521-1 “are not applicable to bullfights when an uninterrupted local tradition can be invoked” or “to cockfights in localities where an unbroken tradition can be established”.
His bill has very little chance of succeeding but aims to relaunch the recurring debate on bullfighting in France.
“I support bullfighting as I support tradition”
“Let’s stop this stigma, of wanting to make people feel guilty who go to bullfights, who eat meat, the subjects are not there”, has already reacted on Public Senate Carole Delga, the PS president of the Occitanie region, where bullfighting is practiced. “I support bullfighting as I support tradition,” she claimed.
For André Viard, president of the National Observatory of Bullfighting Cultures, the ban on bullfighting is a “recurring” theme in each legislature but “goes against cultural freedom, protected by the Constitution, and the identity of the territories”, he believes.
The text risks embarrassing the presidential majority, divided on the subject. In July 2021, when she was not yet president of the Renaissance group in the Assembly, MP Aurore Bergé had signed a platform to ban bullfighting, a practice deemed “barbaric”.