European Commission: Albania’s EU membership talks on track for closure in December 2027

The Commission is expected to formally endorse Albania’s membership timeline for 2027 in a new action plan, which is also expected to include a list of key results that Tirana will have to prioritize in order to complete the process by the end of next year.

The European Commission is working toward closing Albania’s accession process by December 2027 — a timeline Tirana has long mentioned and which is now expected to receive formal recognition in the EU’s upcoming enlargement roadmaps, EU officials told Euronews.

The Commission is preparing an action plan to confirm Albania’s stated goal of closing all negotiating chapters by the end of next year, and to set out priority results for filling the remaining membership gaps.

Albania has set the end of 2027 as its target for completing accession negotiations, a timeline that Prime Minister Edi Rama and other senior officials have repeatedly described as a plan agreed with the European Commission.

However, while Commission officials have supported the ambition, the EU executive usually does not set deadlines for accession, since enlargement is meant to be a merit-based process.

“As you know, enlargement doesn’t work with dates. But the closer the country gets to the end of the technical part of membership, the more we can say about it or the more we can use the years,” Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos said in July.

That will soon change. In her State of the Union address to the European Parliament last week, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced a series of “roadmaps” for candidate countries.

“We will soon propose roadmaps for the candidates that have made the most progress,” von der Leyen said, naming Ukraine, Moldova and the Western Balkans as countries whose future lies in the EU.

The roadmaps are expected to set out an indicative timeline to give candidate countries a clearer sense of direction, echoing the 2002 enlargement strategy that paved the way for the “Big Bang” accession of 10 new members, Euronews reports.

The roadmaps will be included in the Commission’s enlargement package, its annual review of the accession process, expected at the end of October, which also includes country-specific assessments and recommendations for next steps.

In this context, the Commission is drafting a closing benchmark assessment report that evaluates whether a candidate country has met the established standards to be considered as having fulfilled the membership requirements, particularly in justice and the rule of law, the so-called “fundamentals”.

In Albania’s case, the plan is to include a list of key results defining the reforms and measures needed to close the remaining gaps in the benchmarks.

This was already the case for Montenegro, where the Commission used the closing benchmark process to define the concrete reforms and results to be delivered.

The list of results is meant to clearly signal to candidate countries where the priorities lie, pushing them to complete the missing steps.

“Basically, the Commission saw that this approach worked well with Montenegro and they want to repeat it,” an EU official told Euronews, asking to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the discussion.

Source: Euronews