"When you scare everyone, this is the result": Laurent Duplomb's reaction to the petition against his law

Laurent Duplomb has given his name to one of the most controversial texts of recent years. His law, adopted by Parliament after a chaotic process , aimed to remove constraints on the farming profession, but has found itself criticized in particular because of the reintroduction of certain toxic pesticides authorized throughout Europe.

A petition on the National Assembly website reached 1,184,000 signatures on the morning of Monday, July 21, while the threshold of 500,000 had never been crossed since its creation in 2020. It allows for the possibility of organizing a debate on the issue raised if the conference of group presidents of the Assembly, the next of which will be held in mid-September, decides it is appropriate.

Senator for Haute-Loire, Laurent Duplomb, said on RMC this Monday that the far left and environmentalists are behind the "demonization" of his text.

"I don't know if it's a snub, but it shows that there's an opposition that we already knew existed, that has demonized the elements. I'm not sure that if it hadn't been exploited by the far left and the ecologists, the French would have spontaneously seized this petition and signed it," he said to Matthieu Belliard on RMC.

"When you demonize things and scare everyone, you can only have this result... We just want to bring France back to the level of Europe, because there is unfair competition for producers," he continues.

He insists that his text, the result of eight years of work in the Senate, was only intended to bring France into line with European standards. "We ban the use of certain products that prevent our producers from producing, yet we continue to import the products in question. 75% of fruit is imported. When will we understand that we must stop this bloodbath?" he asks.

He believes, and seems to regret, that the Assembly's petition system "is also designed to put pressure on the Constitutional Council and to hope that the latter does not validate the law."

Could President Emmanuel Macron intervene and not enact the controversial text? According to some experts, it is not impossible that the Constitutional Council could censor certain articles of the text. And only then could Emmanuel Macron intervene, at the very end of the process, and not before, the Élysée Palace clarified yesterday on RMC.