Leuven: Europe’s research ministers have edged toward agreement on how the Union should bankroll science in the next decade, reaching a partial common position that keeps a fraught negotiation moving without resolving its hardest questions. Meeting in mid-June, the Council signed off on a partial negotiating mandate for the regulation establishing the new European Competitiveness Fund, the vehicle the Commission wants at the heart of the 2028 to 2034 budget. The position is explicitly incomplete: financial and horizontal issues remain tangled up in the wider budget talks, and ministers left them for later.
The fund matters because it would house the successor to Horizon Europe, the framework programme that has distributed research grants across the continent for years. The Commission has proposed roughly 175 billion euros for that next programme, often shorthanded as FP10, and wants it nested inside a larger competitiveness instrument that also covers industrial policy, digital infrastructure and strategic technologies. The partial deal gives the Council a mandate to open talks with the European Parliament, the next stage in a process that has already slipped past one self-imposed deadline.
The architecture is precisely what worries much of the research community. Universities, learned societies and many scientists fear that folding curiosity-driven research into a fund built around competitiveness will tilt money toward near-market applications and away from the basic inquiry that has no obvious commercial payoff but underpins long-run discovery. Advocates of the merger argue the opposite case: that Europe has spent too long producing excellent papers while others commercialise the results, and that tying research more tightly to industrial strategy is the only way to convert knowledge into jobs and resilience.
There is also the unresolved question of who gets to take part. Parliamentarians have pressed for arrangements that would let close partners such as Switzerland and the United Kingdom associate quickly to the new programme, arguing that severing or delaying those scientific ties would weaken Europe’s collective research base. Association has been a recurring source of friction, entangled with politics that have little to do with laboratories, and the next programme’s openness to non-EU partners remains an open and sensitive file.
For now, the partial position is best read as a placeholder that prevents the file from stalling entirely. It commits the Council to a direction without committing it to the numbers that will determine whether Europe’s next research programme is a genuine expansion or a rebranding of existing money under a new and more industrial banner. Researchers watching from their labs have learned to wait for the figures before celebrating, and the figures are still some way off.
