Paris council suspends funding for elite university after pro-Palestine demonstrations

The leader of the Regional Council of Ile-de-France, which includes Paris, has announced the suspension of funding for the Sciences Po University in the French capital because of pro-Palestine demonstrations. The announcement was made by Valerie Pecresse in a post on X yesterday.

The former presidential candidate for the Republicans claimed to defend “the right to free, informed and respectful debates within the French university, in accordance with the universal values of humanism that it carries, and which are at the heart of our Republican charter.”

Pecresse held La France Insoumise (LFI) opposition party responsible along with “a minority of radicalised people calling for anti-Semitic hatred, and instrumentalised by LFI and its Islamo-leftist allies.”

She said she decided to suspend all funding from the Region intended for Sciences Po “until calm and security have been restored” in the university.

Students at the university, one of the most prestigious in France, are organising demonstrations to protest against the situation in Gaza, where Israeli attacks continue, and to send a message of solidarity with Palestine.

US universities have since 18 April witnessed a widespread student movement denouncing the Israeli war on Gaza and rejecting their universities’ investments in companies that support Israel, as well as their government’s blind support for the occupation state. The intensity of these protests has increased and spread to dozens of other prominent universities with the intervention of police forces and the arrest of dozens of students.

The unprecedented momentum of the student movement in support of Palestine in the US has since extended to other universities in countries such as France, the UK, Germany and Australia.

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