The research bill, expected Wednesday in the Council of Ministers, promises an unprecedented investment to reinvigorate an anemic system. But he faces a flood of critics, who accuse him of lacking ambition and aggravating precariousness in the scientific world.
Repeatedly postponed since its launch by Edouard Philippe at the start of 2019, this text must be presented to the Council of Ministers - after two postponements - for examination in Parliament in September. Without having been modified, despite several months of a new challenge among researchers.
Inject 25 billion euros in ten years
Its ambition: to breathe new life into a system weakened by chronic underinvestment. The multi-year research bill, called “LPPR”, thus outlines a budgetary trajectory reinjecting 25 billion euros over the next ten years, to allow France to maintain its position in an intensifying world scientific competition.
"There has not been an equivalent investment in research since the 1950s", assures the Minister of Research Frédérique Vidal, whose objective is that the budget for public research reaches 1% of the GDP (against 0, Currently 7%), the level to which France committed 20 years ago.
These 25 billion euros must be injected in stages, so that in 2030 the budget will reach 20 billion euros per year, 5 billion more than today. A large part aims to enhance the careers of researchers, to make them more attractive.
"Not up to par"
But after decades of clear cuts, the overall envelope is considered largely insufficient by the detractors of the text, more and more numerous. Mobilized since January, unions and collectives in the academic world have multiplied actions - rallies, petitions, forums, magazine strikes, "dead days" ... - and sent several thousand people to the streets in early March, to demand the withdrawal of an "unjust" law in their eyes.
Several bodies consulted in recent weeks have also expressed serious doubts. In a scathing opinion given at the end of June, the Economic, Social and Environmental Council (Cese) notably estimated that the planned investment was "not up to the challenges" that France has to face. The 400 million euros that will be invested in 2021, he notes, represents less than the investment of 2020 (500 million). And the government "weighs the efforts announced mainly on the next two five years", which does not engage anything, according to Cese.
Same criticism from the Academy of Sciences, which expressed its "disappointment". "The budgetary effort, modest and spread over ten years, will certainly not allow to assume" the ambitions displayed, estimate the members of the Academy for which it is lacking "at least fifteen billion additional euros by here 2030 ".
Fear of an "explosion of precariousness"
Beyond the budget, it is the very philosophy of the text that is decried and its flagship measure aimed at distributing new funding mainly by calls for projects, by bailing out the National Research Agency (ANR) up to one billion euros.
For opponents, this strengthening of research on projects will come at the expense of long-term, so-called "basic" funding from laboratories, many of which are already weakened. They see it as the advent of “competitive and selective” research for the benefit of a few, and which is detrimental to academic freedom.
Another point of tension: the social aspect of the LPPR, which creates parallel recruitment routes to attract young scientists, including "tenure courses" in the American style, a contract allowing access to tenure after six years maximum.
These “junior professorships” could go up to a quarter of the creation of posts for research directors and professors. With the establishment of "scientific mission CDI", they are seen as a "liquidation of the statutes" by the majority of unions who fear a "precarious explosion", while a quarter of the research workforce is already not permanent, as pointed out by Cese.
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