On Wednesday 17 April the European Parliament approved in plenary session – the last of the European legislature 2014-2019 – the provisional agreement on Horizon Europe, reached by the EU institutions in the informal trialogue of 19 March. The agreement was approved by a large majority.
This is the last official confirmation of the outcome of the institutional negotiations.
The positive outcome of the negotiation allows the EU institutions to achieve the objective set at the beginning of the process: to close a political agreement on most of the text of the next program before the end of the current legislature; and – above all – it allows us all, more than twenty months after the official launch, to have a very precise idea of how the European R&I program will be for the seven years from 2021 to 2027.
The agreement approved by the Council and Parliament defines a “consolidated” legislative text of the next program, which includes: general and specific objectives; the structure and the articulation in pillars; the names of the clusters: the areas for missions and partnerships; the rules for participation and financing, the rules on ethics and safety, the evaluation criteria; the structure, objectives and contents of the European Innovation Council; governance aspects; the lines of R&I activities for all the themes of the program. The provisional agreement, on the other hand, does not include the horizontal aspects, subject to the general agreement on EU programming 2021-27: the overall budget of the program and its internal structure; the rules on the association of third countries; synergies with other sectoral programs.
The institutional passages of confirmation of the agreement allow us to “formalize” the “consolidated” texts of the next program:
- the text of the Framework Program: the part of text highlighted in green constitutes the approved and “consolidated” text, the one not highlighted is – on the contrary – what remains out of the agreement and which will be discussed in the next phase of the negotiations;
- the text of the Specific Program: in this case the portions of text in square brackets are not included in the agreement: all the rest constitutes the «consolidated» text.