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MARSEILLE, France (CN) — After France’s Constitutional Council ruled that reintroducing a banned pesticide was unconstitutional, opponents of an agricultural law claimed partial victory while supporters lamented government overreach.
The left mostly applauded Thursday’s decision to remove the most controversial provision of the freshly passed Duplomb law, which sparked over 2.1 signatures in the nation’s most-signed petition and led to the council’s review.
The body ruled that the reintroduction of acetamiprid would violate Article 1 of the country’s Charter for the Environment: “Everyone has the right to live in a balanced environment which shows due respect for health.”
“It’s not surprising, because in fact, we had filed an appeal with that in mind,” Jean-Claud Tissot, a French senator and farmer, told Courthouse News. “We demonstrated that the bill was incompatible with the environmental charter … . Legally, it stated the obvious, the truth.”
Right-wing figures equated the move to an infringement on democracy.
“Duplomb Law: by acting like a legislator while lacking democratic legitimacy, the Constitutional Council is sawing off the branch it is sitting on,” the extreme-right National Rally leader Marine Le Pen posted on X.
The Duplomb law was packaged as an effort to alleviate pressure on farmers by loosening regulations on industrial-sized operations and water storage projects, known as mega-basins. But the most controversial measure was to reintroduce acetamiprid, a neonicotinoid pesticide banned in France since 2020.
Acetamiprid affects the neural systems of pests, but scientists have warned that it can also pose health risks to humans. It is legal in the EU, leading senator and namesake of the law Laurent Duplomb to argue that strict regulations put French farmers at a disadvantage.
Parliament adopted the law on July 8. But two days later, Eléonore Pattery — a 23-year-old master’s student — launched a petition that climbed to over 2 million signatures, forcing new debates in parliament and the public discourse.
As signatures flowed in, the Socialists filed an appeal with the Constitutional Council, the committee that examines whether any part of a law violates France’s constitution.
Angélique Thiallier, a dairy cow farm-owner and the vice president of the Movement for the Defense of Family Farmers, known as MODEF, told Courthouse News that although she’s optimistic about the decision, it didn’t go as far as she’d hoped. French President Emmanuel Macron is expected to sign the law without further debate beyond the removal of the acetamiprid article.
“I was saying, ‘No way! They did it, they did it!’ and then, when you look a little closer, it’s a partial censorship, so it’s not a victory,” Thiallier told Courthouse News.
Pierre Allorant, historian and political scientist at the University of Orléans, was also taken aback.
“So this is a surprise and a real snub, a defeat for the government, for the FNSEA (National Federation of French Workers’ Unions) farmers’ unions, and for the political right, because they had insisted on what this law could bring in terms of French agricultural exports and productivity,” he told Courthouse News. “It reintroduces, in a way, a somewhat classic, traditional right-left divide.”
While most of the right-wing and Macron’s center-right coalition backed the law, left-wing politicians largely denounced it; in Allorant’s view, it’s a difference between promoting large-scale agricultural production and a boost in potential exports versus sustainable farming.
The FNSEA could not be immediately reached for a request to comment.
For Luc Rouban, a senior research fellow at Sciences Po Paris, the decision is giving new fuel to the right-wing discourse — already boosted byU.S. President Donald Trump’s influence — that judges or councils can unfairly interfere in political decisions, even though Rouban finds nothing shocking in the Constitutional Council’s ruling.
This issue is rendered even more complex by a similar issue of the role of science in politics.
“Overall, you can clearly see — on the side of Trumpism or neoconservative theories in the United States — the idea that, basically, science can be circumvented and that political voluntarism must take priority, you see, over science,” Rouban said. “This is complex, because we’re entering areas where you have two visions of science — Either you have a vision that says science must be subject to politics, or, on the other side, politics must be subject to science.”
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