Cypriot MEP calls on UK to reduce university tuition fees

Cypriot member of the European Parliament Loucas Fourlas on Wednesday called on the British government to reduce university tuition fees for Cypriots and other European Union citizens who elect to study in the United Kingdom.

“A stronger and more autonomous Europe cannot be built only with defence and geopolitical strategies, it is built with knowledge, with young people, with equal opportunities in education,” he said during the day’s European Parliament plenary session in Strasbourg.

He said he wished “to focus on a very specific but serious political question, because we are speaking about relations with other countries”, adding that EU citizens who study in the UK are required to pay “endless fees” since the UK’s departure from the EU.

To this end, he said that “education cannot be transformed to a tool of exclusion, nor can it be collateral damage in geopolitical tensions”.

“On February 17, I will go to London as a member of the education committee, with the clear goal of working towards the reduction of those fees, and at this point, I address the European institutions,” he said.

“If the United Kingdom wishes to re-examine its relationship with the European Union, and this relationship cannot be one-sided, it must give something back as well, and a tangible good-will step is the reduction of tuition fees for European students.”

Tuition fees for EU citizens at British universities have skyrocketed since the country left the European single market at the end of 2020.

While British students have also seen their fees increase to £9,535 (€10,922) per year to bachelor’s degrees, with the most recent increase having come into effect last year, the EU’s requirement that students from across the bloc be allowed the same access to UK universities has been lifted, allowing them to charge EU citizens much more.

As such, some universities in the UK have begun charging EU citizens as much as £38,000 (€43,529) per year.

Fourlas on Wednesday also took umbrage with the EU’s leadership’s statements on recent geopolitical developments, demanding of them why they “forgot Cyprus”.

He directly addressed European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas, and European Council president Antonio Costa, all of whom were present in the chamber on Wednesday.

“You said that you will not accept any violation of the rule of law in Venezuela, Gaza, Iran, Greenland, even in Africa. Why did you forget Cyprus?”

Von der Leyen had in her address to the chamber spoken extensively about Greenland, with United States President Donald Trump continuing to demand that Denmark hand over sovereignty of the island to the US.

“Greenland is not just a territory and a key region of the world map, a land rich in critical raw materials, a strategic outpost on emerging global sea routes: it’s all of these things. But above all, Greenland is home to a free and sovereign people. It is a nation with its sovereignty and its right to territorial integrity,” she said.