This month, Aix-Marseille University will host an official welcome for the first American researchers recruited through its €15 million (£12.8 million) programme, established in response to the Donald Trump administration’s staggering attacks on research and higher education. It’s one of many European schemes aiming to recruit talented scholars fleeing the US, amid what French higher education minister Philippe Baptiste has described as a “reverse enlightenment”.

French president Emmanuel Macron, for instance, has launched a national €100 million (£85 million) “Choose France for Science” programme, with a clear view to luring US-based researchers, in particular. The Royal Society has announced a £30 million “Faraday fellowship” scheme to attract global research talent to the UK, and a similar NKr100 million (£7.2 million) scheme has been unveiled by the Research Council of Norway. Meanwhile, in May, the European Commission launched a €500 million seven-year “super-grant” scheme to “make Europe a magnet for researchers”.

But how safe a haven can Europe really offer researchers from the anti-academic excesses of the populist far right? That is unclear to those European observers who look to the US’ slashing of research funding and attempts to block incoming international students and see a grim portent of what could happen in their own countries as the far right grows ever more popular.

In the past two months alone, the far-right Chega party has become Portugal’s main opposition and the Law and Justice-aligned Karol Nawrocki has won the presidency in Poland. Over the past two years, the PVV won the most seats in the Dutch general election, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally received almost a third of French votes in the European elections, the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) topped the polls in Austria and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) became the second biggest party in the Bundestag.

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Meanwhile, far-right parties are in government in several European countries, including Italy, Hungary and – – the Netherlands. And Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has consistently led British opinion polls in recent months and made in recent local elections.

Indeed, the threat – or the reality – of the far right taking power is evident in “most” European countries, according to Bernold Hasenknopf, a professor of chemistry and adviser for European commitment at Sorbonne University.

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To Hasenknopf, the far right’s influence in France is visible “throughout the political spectrum”. In December 2023, for instance, Macron’s government approved a hard-line immigration law, which included the requirement for international students to pay a “return deposit” to obtain a residence permit. While the deposit was ultimately scrapped, the then National Rally leader Marine Le Pen celebrated the legislation as an “ideological victory”.

“When the mainstream political parties are borrowing from the far right’s playbook, you don’t even need the far-right parties any more,” said Hasenknopf.

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Needless to say, the far right does not have a high opinion of universities. In the US, Trump’s Make America Great Again movement has decried their “woke” agendas and cheered as Trump has gone after Harvard University in particular, attempting to cut all its federal research funding, block it from recruiting international students and force its existing international students to transfer to other institutions, after the institution refused to comply with Trump’s for limits on student protests, the end of diversity programmes and to move towards “viewpoint diversity in admissions and hiring”. Both Trump and vice-president J.D. Vance have explicitly praised Hungarian president Viktor Orbán, who has seized control of many of the country’s universities and forced others out of the country altogether during his 15 years in power – a precedent also previously followed by Florida governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis.

The Swedish political scientist Bo Rothstein, emeritus professor at the University of Gothenburg, said the far right’s hostility towards higher education is rooted in a desire for untrammelled power. “They have what I have defined as a kind of totalitarian idea of democracy,” he said. “So when they have become the majority, they do not accept that any other institutions will have independence – not the courts, not the media, not the universities. They think that now they have the majority, they should decide everything.”

Higher education and research are targeted because “science very often contradicts the far-right agenda,” Hasenknopf said. “The far right is defending fossil fuels, and science is explaining the problem with climate change. The far right is trying to limit migration, and science can prove the benefits of migration. Science is challenging their ideology.”

Nor can research be permitted to “contradict the historical narratives of the far right”, Hasenknopf said, with areas such as post-colonial studies and Holocaust studies particular targets. The recently elected Polish president Nawrocki formerly led the Institute of National Remembrance and the Museum of the Second World War, institutions described by antisemitism scholar Michał Bilewicz as promoting an “idealised narrative of Poland’s past”. Nawrocki’s predecessor, Andrzej Duda, repeatedly blocked Bilewicz’s promotion to full professor, describing him as an “anti-Polish scholar” – likely due to his research on the Holocaust.

In Austria, the past decade has seen the far right extend its criticism from the humanities to science, according to Oliver Gruber, associate professor in political science at the University of Vienna. Amid the Covid pandemic and the climate crisis, the political animus also “started to include medicine, climate research and energy research. The Freedom Party considers contemporary science a rather leftist, ‘woke’ endeavour that is ideologically motivated in their eyes. They would even say it suppresses other positions, especially those coming from the far right.” And while the party failed to form a government after its election success, it has already had “a big impact”, he said, by popularising “a sceptical stance towards science and [presenting] universities as these elitist, ivory-tower institutions”.

Anja Giudici, lecturer in education at Cardiff University, noted that negative perceptions of universities are not limited to the extremes of right-wing politics, particularly when they are considered to play a role in social mobility. “Research shows that when the universities start taking in a broader share of students and become more socially diverse, the right becomes more critical of them because they start to have redistributive effects,” she said.

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But the international nature of universities is a red rag to the far right in particular, said Vassiliki Papatsiba, reader in social sciences at Cardiff. “Universities become targets because they represent internationalism that challenges nationalist narratives,” she explained, noting that populist movements often seek to “exploit division between university-educated and non-university-educated voters”.

Germany’s AfD has repeatedly targeted what it calls “agenda sciences”, tabling a 2023 Bundestag motion criticising “postcolonial studies, disability studies, critical whiteness studies, fat studies, queer studies, and above all, gender studies”. The party employed similar rhetoric in its 2025 election campaign.

“They claim they want to depoliticise science,” said Hasenknopf. “That is quite remarkable, because they are painting any scientific result as only the opinion of that scientist, and saying their science must be stopped because it’s ideological. They’re blurring the difference between scientific facts and opinions.”

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Mainstream parties have adopted similar stances, experts note. In 2021, the then French minister of higher education, Frédérique Vidal, instructed the national research agency CNRS to carry out an investigation into “Islamo-leftism” in French research; in response, the CNRS said the term , decrying “a regrettable instrumentalisation of science”.

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“It was a clear witch-hunt, and a direct attack on academic freedom,” said Hasenknopf. “It shows how this far-right rhetoric influences mainstream politics, which I think is one of the most dangerous things going on at the moment.”

Mats Benner, professor in research policy at Lund University, said the Swedish government had been “on the verge of falling for” anti-university rhetoric in recent years, with centre-right former education minister Mats Persson commissioning a report into the supposed “cancel culture” within academia and its impact on academic freedom.

“It was a fairly ruthless attempt to exploit the sentiment that freedom of speech is threatened at universities, and there’s so much that you can’t speak about these days,” said Benner. , however, found that respondents were far more likely to cite issues relating to “political influence and research funding” as the biggest threats to academic freedom in Sweden.

Moreover, since Trump returned to the White House, anti-university rhetoric has become “less attractive [in Sweden] now you see the real consequences of it”, Benner said. “Few people want to be associated with the kind of policies that are being pursued in the US, not least when it comes to universities, so I would say that the entire question of ‘wokeism’ and student activism has ceased. At least for the time being, it’s not the winning issue in political debates here.”

But that does not appear to be the case in the Netherlands, where the PVV still has a in polling ahead of October’s general election – called after the PVV collapsed the government it led after winning the 2023 general election by a wide margin.

“The most basic and strong instrument is the budget,” Gruber said, and the PVV didn’t hesitate to wield it during its brief period in office: the latest Dutch national budget cut higher education and science funding by €500 million, with grants for early-career academics among the biggest casualties, prompting countrywide protest and legal action from universities.

Far-right anti-immigration sentiment, meanwhile, can manifest as hostility towards international students, another challenge currently faced by Dutch universities. Much wrangling has taken place in recent years over the country’s “internationalisation in balance” bill, which aims to reduce international intake and English-language instruction. Sector pressure has resulted in the scrapping of controversial requirements for undergraduate programmes that aren’t taught in Dutch to meet strict conditions, but universities have already cut or converted English-taught programmes in subjects such as psychology, economics and medicine.

Nor is the Netherlands the only country to target English-language teaching. In the 2023-24 academic year, Norway introduced tuition fees for students from outside the European Economic Area and Switzerland, prompting a 71 per cent fall in new enrolments from so-called third-country students. Meanwhile, a new requirement for international PhD students and researchers to take Norwegian language classes was introduced last August, although it was scrapped earlier this year.

Both Norway and the Netherlands, Cardiff’s Papatsiba said, “provide concrete examples of how right-wing populist policies affect universities”.

So what, if anything, can be done to protect European universities and academics as the far right grows ever more powerful? Hasenknopf put it bluntly: “Universities must act, and they must act now, before it’s too late”. In particular, he thinks, they should lobby for greater legal protections for “individuals and institutions against political attacks on scientific work”.

Gothenburg’s Rothstein, however, is more sceptical: “I’m not sure that you can actually secure academic freedom through legal means,” he said. “I think it has to come from other sources.” Implementing “mandatory education” for new graduate students on the principles of academia, for instance, could empower them to publicly defend academic freedom, he suggested, noting that “not so few” students embark on an academic career “without really understanding what the university is”. However, his suggestion that this measure be adopted in Sweden has so far been resisted.

For Gruber, securing the support of other political parties is crucial for the sector’s ability to weather a far-right government. Such parties “must not copy the seed of doubt that is sown by radical-right parties among many voters, but instead must emphasise the need for evidence-based policymaking and the need for science”. But the anti-science scepticism that proliferated during the pandemic suggests that universities must “invest much more into the transfer and the explanation of research findings to the broader public”, Gruber added.

By the same token, universities must be wary of simply dismissing anti-university rhetoric, Lund’s Benner warned. “The far right exploits the feeling of being disempowered, or being excluded from general societal conversation,” he said. “So I think the correct way to do it is not to isolate from the popular sentiment, but actually to engage with it. This is a crisis, yes, but it’s not the first crisis, and it’s a crisis that can be dealt with by being even better at communicating what universities actually do.”

Higher education institutions cannot be expected to challenge negative rhetoric alone, Sorbonne’s Hasenknopf said: “Scientists should consider public outreach as part of their professional duty. But other stakeholders – public authorities, for example – should give science a place in the public discourse.”

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Still, for universities themselves, winning such a “political battle” will require “a lot of engagement, a lot of resources and time”, Hasenknopf warned. “It is very difficult. But that does not mean one should not engage in it.”