Macron's Gifts to France's Nature Desecrators
Since Emmanuel Macron's first five-year term, subsidies to the French hunting federation have risen significantly. Enough to alarm environmentalists.
Twice the website Lanceuralerte.org had called on the national hunters' federation to disclose its accounts.
This is a legal obligation. However, the hobby hunters under President Willy Schraen kept stalling and delayed the publication. This August, however, they complied and published their accounts from 2017 to 2021. And what the website Lanceurs d’Alerte discovered is a gigantic increase in public subsidies.
Noting that Willy Schraen had called on people to «vote for Macron in the first round of the 2022 presidential election«, the journalist responsible for the investigation revealed that subsidies had risen by 23’000% between 2017 and 2021.
The investigation first details in depth how Emmanuel Macron's 50% reduction on the national hunting licence led to an explosion in membership fee revenue from 11 to 28 million euros. Added to this is the eco-contribution, a premium of 10 euros paid by the state for each hunting licence. A sum intended «to fund biodiversity projects‚ implemented by the departmental hunting federations, as Lanceuralerte.org explains in detail. This sum amounts to 15 million euros per year.The reality of this «reclaiming of biodiversityt» is moreover sharply criticised by environmental organisations.
A Macron Effect
«With such revenues, the federation was able to increase its wage bill by almost 28.67%«, writes the website. While it «had until then been fixed at around 1.5 million eurosr», it now stands at almost 2 million.
The study's conclusion is scathing: public funds are also raining down on the hunting association. In 2021, it received 11.46 million euros in public subsidies, whereas in 2017 it received only 27’000 euros in subsidies and in 2020 it received 6.3 million euros in public subsidies. That represents, according to the accounting, an increase of 23’000% between 2017 and 2021. Emmanuel Macron moved into the Élysée Palace in May 2017.
A real gift?
Hobby hunters, angered by the comments surrounding their finances, counter that these figures can partly be explained by the fact that the national hunting association is now responsible for compensating wild boar damage. Previously, the Office National de la Chasse et de la Flore Sauvage was responsible for this compensation. But as the LPO, the bird protection league, points out: hobby hunters have, for understandable reasons, long deliberately contributed to the population explosion of wild boar.
The result is more or less the same in the end: public funds «finance the hobby of an ultra-minority of 1.5% hobby hunters, who cause considerable inconvenience to the 98.5% of non-hunters«, summarises @RurauxC on Twitter.
