Duplomb Law: The Constitutional Council will deliver its decision "a priori" on August 7

The Constitutional Council will deliver its highly anticipated decision on the contested Duplomb law , which reintroduces a pesticide by way of exception, on August 7, the institution announced on Friday, July 25.

The decision of the Sages, who can censor all or part of the law, will be closely scrutinized, as a petition filed on the National Assembly website calling for the text to be repealed has collected more than 1.9 million signatures, a record for such an initiative.

Left-wing deputies and senators appealed to the Constitutional Council in mid-July, arguing that the law, adopted by Parliament on July 8, is incompatible with environmental protection and the right to health.

The MPs also denounced the conditions under which the text was examined. No amendments were able to be debated in the Assembly chamber, as the text was rejected outright by its supporters to circumvent what they described as "obstruction" from the left.

The law of Republican Senator Laurent Duplomb notably authorizes the conditional reintroduction of acetamiprid, a pesticide from the neonicotinoid family banned in France but authorized elsewhere in Europe.

This product, toxic to biodiversity and potentially to human health, is in demand by beet and hazelnut producers, who believe they have no alternative to combat the pests and are subject to unfair competition from foreign producers.

The applicants to the Constitutional Council believe that this reintroduction contravenes in particular the principles of precaution and non-environmental regression.

The law, presented by its supporters as a response to the agricultural protests of 2024, contains other controversial measures, for example the raising of environmental authorization thresholds for intensive livestock farming or the facilitation of water storage for crop irrigation (mega-basins).

If the text is not censored by the Constitutional Council, the left is already calling on Emmanuel Macron to request a new deliberation of the law in Parliament, as the constitution allows him to do.

If it is promulgated by the president, several left-wing groups, including the socialists, have announced that they intend to introduce a bill repealing the provisions of the agricultural text.