Hostility on Horizon for next European research commissioner

The next European commissioner for education and research will be parachuted into a tense planning process for the second half of Horizon Europe and its successor programme, with national budgets squeezed and a sense that the European Union must respond to war on its doorstep.

Iliana Ivanova, a former MEP and EU auditor who is Mariya Gabriel’s expected successor as Bulgaria’s EU commissioner, seems like a strong candidate to shape the final years of the bloc’s €95.5 billion (£82 billion) research and development programme.

If she gets the nod from the European Parliament after her 5 September hearing, the chair of the EU’s audit quality control committee will sit down to an inbox dominated by the 2025-27 chunk of Horizon Europe’s strategic planning process – an opaque procedure that turns its basic law into a second work programme of funding calls.

Intended to link politics to project grants, on paper the process involves anyone with an interest in European research and innovation, but in practice it is wholly controlled by European Commission staff, an official who leads on Horizon Europe for an EU country told Times Higher Education.

“The strategic plan is basically a pure commission thing,” they said, referring to the impossibility of ministries organising meaningful feedback on a 130-page document over the summer. That empowers Ms Ivanova or, given her mid-term arrival less than a year before EU elections, her deputies.

The most important hand in shaping the last three-years of Horizon and its unnamed successor will therefore belong to Marc Lemaître, the Luxembourg civil servant who took over the commission’s research department in February this year.

Jean-Claude Burgelman, professor of open science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, who previously oversaw the issue at the commission, said that Ms Ivanova would step into a “wind-down dynamic”, but that her advocacy would be “essential” for getting a good budget for the next Horizon, while Mr Lemaître was a “very skilled official”.

As wildfires raged around the Mediterranean in late July, EU research ministers met in Santander, ostensibly to discuss science diplomacy but also to stake out early positions on the 2028-34 programme. Back in Brussels, talk has been that the embryonic programme must have a fresh “policy narrative” that considers the conflict in Ukraine and the bloc’s ambition to “de-risk” its relationship with China, the national official said. “There should be different answers from five years ago,” they added, summarising sentiment at early meetings that took in dual-use research, among other topics.

Different camps are limbering up for tugs-of-war over how the next Horizon should serve wider EU objectives, either as catnip for cross-border collaboration or a prop for more assertive industrial policy, depending on national tastes.

Smaller-than-expected member state budgets are already causing friction over the final public-private partnerships in Horizon Europe, which are partly funded by national coffers and industry, with most governments apparently unhappy about being handed a fait accompli shortlist to consider over August. “Hopefully it will be not too much of a disaster, but everywhere public budgets are shrinking and at all levels the easiest is to cut where you don’t have legally obliged funding,” the official said.

Aside from making a success of one and a half mammoth funding programmes, Mr Lemaître and Ms Ivanona have the unhappy job of firing 75 staff from the research department, part of a pan-commission efficiency drive Professor Burgelman described as “cheese-shaving”.

A commission spokesperson said EU countries had many opportunities to shape Horizon, including strategic meetings every other month in 2023, events, country visits and the ministerial meeting in Santander.

“The commission takes this very seriously, and a process of co-design together with the member states ensures consistency between EU and national priorities,” they said.

ben.upton@timeshighereducation.com