The Dutch government wants to modernize the European Union, but it doesn’t want to pay the price. The EU’s research budget suffers.
In 2017, a group of experts chaired by former WTO chief Pascal Lamy recommended more than doubling the EU research budget to 160 billion euros to “allow funding of a reasonable proportion of proposals.” A year later, the European Commission proposed 100 billion euros – still a substantial increase over the 77 billion allocated to the running research program, Horizon 2020. The European Parliament, however, deemed 120 billion euros a better number. But as it stands now, the next EU research program, called Horizon Europe, has been allocated a core budget of 75.9 billion euros, boosted by a one-off 5 billion euros from the pandemic recovery fund.
Without a doubt, European leaders had some really big fish to fry at the heated budget summit last July. The budgetary consequences of the UK leaving the Union and the preferred way to soften the economic blow caused by the corona outbreak opened some deep rifts across the continent. Still, it’s disappointing to see research and innovation used as a balancing item.
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