The European Union is ready to invest €500 million under its ‘Choose Europe for Science’ program over the next two and a half years to woo researchers and academics from around the world.
The initiative will especially target American academics, as Brussels sees President Trump’s recent threats to withhold federal funds from Ivy League universities for being the breeding grounds of antisemitism and liberal indoctrination as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to finally gain the upper hand in science.
The plans for Choose Europe were unveiled on Monday, May 5th, at an international conference organized by France at Paris’ Sorbonne University. It foresees the allocation of half a billion euros between 2025 and 2027 for grants that “help support the best and the brightest researchers and scientists from Europe and around the
world.”
In her opening speech, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made no secret about using Trump’s policies to her own gain, portraying Washington’s intention to fix the U.S. higher education leftist bias as an attack on scientific research itself.
“The role of science in today’s world is questioned. The investment in fundamental, free, and open research is questioned. What a gigantic miscalculation,” von der Leyen said. “Science has no passport, no gender, no ethnicity or political party.”
French President Emmanuel Macron, who’s long been trying to attract U.S. scientists without success, joined Brussels’ initiative with another €100 million pledge from the ‘France 2030’ program, aiming to make Europe a “safe haven” for science.
“There can be no lasting democracy without free and open science,” Macron said. It’s ironic hearing him talk about democracy, less than two months after a French court banned the top candidate, Marine Le Pen, from participating in the 2027 presidential election.
In addition to ‘Choose Europe,’ von der Leyen also announced to put forward a ‘European Innovation Act’ to codify the freedom of scientific research and further cut red tape, introduce a 7-year “super grant” under the next EU budget, as well as encourage EU countries to spend at least 3% of their GDP on R&D by 2030—the same goal that Brussels was unable to get member states to reach for decades.
Many other speakers also focused on the current political dynamics across the Atlantic, with some describing Trump’s policies as “reverse enlightenment,” while others compared their expected brain drain from the U.S. to the flight of scientists from Soviet and Nazi-occupied countries in the last century.
“We must not downplay what is at stake today,” Macron said. “No one could have imagined a few years ago that one of the world’s largest democracies would abolish research programs because there was the word ‘diversity’ in their programs.”
France has already been working on the local version of this new EU initiative for some time, dubbed ‘Choose France for Science,’ which has been strongly criticized by the French scientific community. The program was launched last month and offers millions of euros to scientists in key fields (such as healthcare, AI, and climate) to continue their research in France. Unsurprisingly, cash-strapped French researchers slammed the idea, saying the government should first take care of its own before paying for foreigners to relocate.
Macron had a similar idea back in 2017 in reply to the first Trump administration withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, offering grants to American climate researchers to relocate to France to ‘Make Our Planet Great Again.’ Although the president claimed on Monday that the program was a great success, there’s no evidence whatsoever to back that up.
