Paris (AFP)

The presence in a corrida of the Minister of Agriculture, Didier Guillaume, and his colleague in charge of the Cohesion of the territories, Jacqueline Gourault, revealed by the newspaper Sud Ouest, on Friday prompted the criticism of several elected ecologists.

The regional daily published a snapshot on which appear Guillaume and Mrs. Gourault during a bullfight Wednesday afternoon, in the middle of 6,000 people in the bullring of Bayonne (Pyrénées-Atlantiques). The matador Daniel Luque, considered one of the greatest of his generation, received a triumph after having dominated six bulls.

"Lamentable", said Friday the MEP EELV Yannick Jadot, who lamented in a message posted on Twitter that "the minister in charge of animal welfare is attending a bullfighting".

Similarly, the spokesman of the environmentalist party Julien Bayou denounced on BFMTV "a clear and clear support (from the two ministers) to a massacre, a dismal spectacle".

The Brigitte Bardot Foundation, for its part, felt that the presence of the two ministers was "beyond scandalous and eccentric".

Regularly called into question by the defenders of the animal cause, the organization of bullfights, in the only "regions of bullfighting tradition", was judged in conformity with the Constitution in 2012 by the Constitutional Council.

In the past, several French politicians have already expressed their attachment to the practice: besides Manuel Valls or Alain Juppé, who are amateurs, the former ecologist MP Noël Mamère had recognized, in one of his works published in 2002 that he loved "hunting and bullfighting".

© 2019 AFP