After much posturing and politicking, European leaders walked away from talks last week without a deal on the European budget for the rest of the decade. The breakdown casts into limbo a European Commission proposal to apportion around €80 billion (US$104 billion) to research over the period 2014–20 — a €29.5 billion rise on Europe’s current seventh Framework programme. And it augurs trouble for research when the impasse is finally broken.

With 27 nations each pushing for their own priorities, finding an agreement on spending plans is inevitably complex, and the tight economic climate aggravated the differences even more than usual.

The key divisive factor is the demand from wealthy nations, including the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands, for substantial cuts to the total €1.025-trillion European Union (EU) budget — a rise of around €50 billion on spending between 2007 and 2013 — proposed by the European Commission. Early in the talks, European Council president Herman Van Rompuy, who is chairing the negotiations, proposed a cut of €80 billion. Media reports say that rich nations are looking for further cuts, of between €30 billion and €75 billion. Speaking to reporters after the talks broke down on Friday afternoon, Van Rompuy said that member states had found a “sufficient degree of potential convergence” to make an agreement on the budget possible early next year.

This should leave enough time for the European Parliament, member states and the commission to thrash out the final details of the research programme, known as Horizon 2020, just in time for research projects to start in 2014, as planned. But that is one of the few bright spots in the outlook for research.

Of the cuts suggested by Van Rompuy, the Horizon 2020 research programme comes out among the worst, with a proposed 12% reduction in funding, according to calculations by the Initiative for Science in Europe (ISE), an independent advocacy coalition of learned societies and scientific organizations in Heidelberg, Germany. The Galileo satellite network, set to rival the US Global Positioning system, faces a 10% cut, and the budget for ITER, the world’s largest nuclear-fusion experiment, is also under threat. Van Rompuy says member states agree that the final budget should encourage economic growth, by focusing spending on research and innovation, as well as on jobs. But EU politics force other priorities. The sharp cuts for research in the Van Rompuy plans allow for more moderate reductions of 3.7% in the budget for agriculture to appease France, and of 5.6% to ‘cohesion funds’ meant for poorer EU regions, to bring Poland on board with the negotiations.

If the proposed 12% cut to research funding sticks in the final deal, all aspects of the Horizon 2020 programme are likely to suffer equally. Unforgivably, this would include the programme’s ‘Excellent Science’ initiatives, such as the European Research Council (ERC), which funds investigator-led frontier research, as well as research infrastructures, such as CERN — the world’s largest particle-physics laboratory, near Geneva in Switzerland, and the institution responsible for the recent discovery of the Higgs boson. The valuable Marie Curie fellowships through which young researchers gain support for career development and experience working in labs abroad would also be threatened.

Helga Nowotny, president of the ERC, sees a bleak future for the council under the Van Rompuy proposals. She fears that the suggested cuts could result in funding for grants in 2014 dropping below levels available in 2009–10. Reductions of this magnitude will decimate success rates, particularly for young researchers, for whom other funding sources are scarce, she says. This would seriously damage the reputation painstakingly built by the ERC since it was founded just five years ago.

European researchers should do everything in their power to articulate the case for Europe’s developing excellence, on which its future supply of scientific and technical manpower will depend. They should lobby their national leaders and support the efforts of the ISE. They can start by signing the petition, which had, as Nature went to press, collected almost 149,000 signatures, at: go.nature.com/s2nm1w.