EU Roadmaps for Candidate Countries to Be Included in Annual Reports — Commission Ready to Back 2027 Deadline for Albania

The European Commission is ready to officially support the 2027 deadline for Albania’s membership in the European Union. According to EU sources for Euronews, the European executive is preparing a new “roadmap” with the list of key tasks Tirana must focus on to complete the negotiation process by the end of next year. The Commission is working to finalize Albania’s accession process by December 2027 — a deadline Tirana has long promoted and which is expected to receive official recognition in future EU enlargement documents.

The news comes after the announcement by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who in her State of the Union speech before the European Parliament last week announced a series of “roadmaps” for candidate countries. “We will soon propose roadmaps for the candidates that have made the most progress,” she declared, mentioning Ukraine, Moldova and the Western Balkans as countries whose future is in the EU. Although the Commission traditionally avoids setting concrete deadlines — the process is merit-based — Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos had signaled a change of approach in July: “the closer a country gets to the end of the technical part of accession, the more we can talk about years as milestones.”

The roadmaps are expected to set an indicative timeframe, to give candidates clearer direction — much like the 2002 enlargement strategy that paved the way for the “Big Bang” with ten new members. The documents will be included in the Commission’s enlargement package — the annual review of the accession process expected at the end of October — with specific assessments for each country and recommendations for next steps.

Alongside the roadmaps, the Commission is also preparing an assessment report on the closing benchmarks: whether a candidate country has met the criteria to be considered as having fulfilled the membership conditions, particularly in justice and the rule of law, the so-called “fundamental” chapters. For Albania, the document is expected to contain the list of key results, with the reforms and measures needed to close the remaining gaps. This approach was already used with Montenegro, where the Commission defined concrete reforms through the closing-benchmarks process. “The Commission saw that this approach worked well with Montenegro and they want to repeat it,” an EU official told Euronews.

For North Macedonia, the message is of particular importance: von der Leyen mentioned the Western Balkans as countries whose future is in the European Union — and the future roadmaps are expected to carry weight for Skopje too.

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