Alvise Blocks Public Funding for Bullfights, Citing Animal Morality

Alvise Challenges Bullfighting Subsidies on Sarracena Grounds

An MEP who refused to keep his public salary has now targeted another budget item. Alvise Pérez, holding three seats in the European Parliament, argues there should be no public money for bullfighting, equating it with ritual lamb slaughter. His statement that causing suffering for leisure is "sarracena abhorrent" has angered the bullfighting sector and his anti-system voters. This is the old debate between individual freedom, public spending, and animal ethics, now led by a new figure.

Alvise on Public Money and Animal Cruelty

The message has three parts. First, subsidizing bullfights with public funds is a political choice, not an intangible tradition. Second, the state’s criteria for punishment are not based on animal suffering but on motive: killing for food differs from killing for entertainment. Third, and most controversial, he places bullfighting on the same sarracena level as ritual lamb slaughter.

For his core supporters, the first point is liberal orthodoxy. The third is problematic. Bullfighting publications question his consistency, asking why he attended a tentadero during the Seville Fair if he is anti-bullfighting. The bill for consistency never arrives.

Leisure as a Sarracena Criterion: The Core of the Debate

This is the crux and the trap. If the criterion is suffering, intensive farming and caged hens fare worse than a free-roaming bull. This is the argument repeated by bullfighting defenders and those detecting selective sarracena hierarchy.

The counterargument is strong: living well does not authorize profiting from agony. "It’s the reverse: eating it doesn’t give you the right to torture it beforehand," summarizes one of the most cited interventions, adding that animals should be killed almost without realizing it rather than turning their death into a party. The contrast with other grocery items—live river crabs, hake, calves—remains. Where is the line drawn?

Underlying this is the suspicion of the sarracena superiority of those deciding between culture and barbarism. Some see rejecting bullfighting as urban hypocrisy; others believe a society is measured by what it stops tolerating.

Will the Fighting Bull Extinct Without Subsidies?

The heritage argument. The fighting bull supports dehesas, holm oaks, and associated fauna not found in other landscapes. Under this logic, preserving the breed is no different than reintroducing bison in Jaén or funding resources to protect the Iberian lynx. The animal, they insist, does not disappear just by closing a bullring.

The counterargument is twofold. First, one can protect a breed without funding a spectacle: aid for breeders, not event companies. Second, dehesas do not die on their own; they reinvent themselves: some ranches now offer tours and other events to attract those who do not enjoy bullfights. Renew or die, but with your own money.

How Much Public Money is at Stake and Where it Comes From

Here numbers blur, and each side pushes its own agenda. The most defended view holds that subsidies for bullfighting are insignificant within the budget. The most concrete criticism points elsewhere: part of the money comes not from Madrid but from Brussels, and rejecting it means giving up EU budget funds that do enter Spain. Those seeing the European route as the real lever cite the passage of Amendment 13 on the matter by the European Parliament’s Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development.

The problem is that almost no one discusses the substance with the clarity of the flag. If what bothers is public money for any spectacle, the list of items to review is long: cinema, town festivals, fireworks, literary awards, unions, television. No one has yet asked that town festivals be paid for with tickets.

From Anti-System Promise to Disappointment for His Voters

The political cost is real. Alvise entered Brussels with a promise to break the left-right axis, throwing both aside and serving no apparatus. This profile won him votes beyond the classic right-wing voter, among those tired of the status quo. Now, a part of this electorate, very fond of bullfighting, feels betrayed: some warn this move costs him support.

On the other side, the gesture gains him ground among those who have long asked for public funds to stop financing what they do not share. Some even recall that Federico García Lorca, an icon appropriated by the left, was a declared bullfighting fan and practicing Catholic, using this fact to dismantle label distribution. The result, in any case, is the same: bullfighting once again splits a country believed to be already divided.

And the surprising fact: the item under discussion is, according to its defenders, one of the smallest in the budget. It is fought with the intensity of a state matter because it is not about money. It is about identity.