Nearly a million signatures against the Duplomb law: a salutary citizen surge

Unprecedented. Since 2019 and the introduction in the National Assembly's rules of procedure of a platform that can accommodate citizen petitions having collected more than 100,000 signatures, the threshold of 500,000 petitioners, which opens the possibility of a parliamentary debate, had never been reached. And less than a week after the adoption of the so-called Duplomb law aimed at "removing constraints on practicing farming," the counter continued to race at a frantic pace. The million people adding their names to say no to acetamiprid should be reached quickly.

In the middle of summer, this citizen mobilization against this pesticide, whose use has been reauthorized by law despite its severe impacts on biodiversity and its potential dangers to human health, is good news. It dramatically contradicts the feeling of citizen disengagement and disinterest in politics. A new participatory democratic tool exists, and citizens are seizing it: clap clap! Only those who prefer to turn a blind eye to the gangrene of democratic decline will complain. Let us recall in passing that the Duplomb law was adopted without real debate, after a motion of rejection was voted on by... the text's supporters. A parliamentary subtlety that thus returns to the figure of the (relative) Macronist majority with this motion of rejection of another kind, the petition.

There is another reason to welcome this citizen mobilization: it brings to the table, and in what way, the complicated debates related to the ecological transition, which the Duplomb law preferred to sweep under the carpet. The LR senator's text is a caricatured example of "Move on, there is nothing to see or change in our agricultural model." Economic lobbies, particularly agri-food lobbies, thought they could carry on their influence work "as usual." It failed. And the opposition they face is not only activist, political, union, or associative. Scientists, lawyers, teachers, and students are getting involved. In fact, this petition establishes the idea that a backlash to the ecological backlash is possible. It is salutary in the sense that it forces debate, a confrontation with the contradictions of our economic and agricultural models. And the argument in favor of the Duplomb law, based on the distortion of competition with certain European countries which penalizes French farmers, while it cannot be dismissed out of hand, cannot be used as a bludgeon to disqualify all the others.