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Spanish city to hold referendum over bullfighting ban

Xinhua, April 19, 2016 Adjust font size:

The mayor of Spain's Basque city of San Sebastian on Tuesday confirmed the city will hold a referendum in September over whether or not to ban bullfighting.

Mayor Eneko Goia said a petition organized by anti-bullfighting platform Orain collected signatures from 5 percent of the inhabitants of the city of 186,000 inhabitants. This was enough for the local authority, a coalition of the Basque Nationalist Party and the Spanish Socialists, to hold a referendum.

It will be the first referendum on whether or not bullfighting should be prohibited in the city and comes after it was reinstated last summer. This comes after a three-year period when it had been banned by the previous local government under the left-wing nationalist party Bildu.

The date of the referendum has yet to be confirmed as it can't coincide with any other electoral process. The second half of the year will see elections held for the Basque regional assembly.

This August will still see bullfights in San Sebastian during the city's annual fiesta held in the middle of the month. Goia said he did not expect the imminent referendum to have any effect on the event.

Bullfighting still divides Spaniards with some seeing it as artistic tradition, while many others view it as a brutal and cruel event. Endit