The European Union countries have chosen Amsterdam as the new home of the European Medicines Agency. It was neck and neck until the very end with Milan.
The European Medicines Agency (European Medicines Agency, Ema) will be relocating from London due to Brexit. Its destination is Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, the city chosen by the European Union member states after months of deliberation. The vote took place during the EU General Affairs Council held in Brussels on the afternoon of today, Monday 20 November.
For the Ema, one of the main priorities linked to the choice was to retain the highest possible number of staff members within its ranks. The list — initially particularly long — of cities potentially in the running to succeed London was thus whittled down by considerations of a purely logistical nature. While around 65 per cent of staff had said they would be willing to relocate to cities such as Milan, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Barcelona (in the latter case, before the Catalan crisis), the percentage dropped dramatically for cities such as Athens, Bucharest, Helsinki, Malta, Warsaw or Zagreb.
The desire to ensure continuity in the agency's work thus came up against the concerns of Brussels, which would have liked to seize the opportunity to rebalance geographically the distribution of EU institutional headquarters — favouring, in this regard, a country in Eastern Europe. Milan put forward a strong bid, but in the end the choice did not go in favour of the Lombard capital.
The system adopted to make the decision was to award six points, which each member state could distribute among three cities. The vote was conducted by secret ballot. By the third round, however, it had not been possible to achieve the necessary majority: Amsterdam and Milan had both obtained thirteen votes. For this reason, in the end, it was a draw that decided the outcome.
