Marta Kos: The new countries that will be integrated make the EU even stronger. We have made progress on enlargement

The European Commissioner for Enlargement, Marta Kos, has stated that the European Union’s enlargement process has marked record progress in recent years and that the accession of new countries will further strengthen the Union. She emphasized the need for early institutional and political preparation for a larger EU.

“In recent years, we have seen record progress in enlargement. Some candidate countries can close accession negotiations by the end of the decade. I see an echo of the late 1990s, when many of today’s member states were preparing to join. This means we must start preparing again for a larger Union,” Kos said.

According to her, this process requires a structured approach in four main directions.

First, the impact of the new members must be assessed.

“We must understand what the impact of the new members will be. What will this mean for EU citizens, for our businesses, for our farmers? This is what the policy reviews are for,” she emphasized.

She pointed out that the new countries must make the Union stronger through internal reforms.

“This means discussing the internal reforms necessary for a larger Union. We can do this by having fewer policy areas where a single country can use a veto against the others. We can also make our institutions more compact, for example by having a rotation system to reduce the number of commissioners. And sometimes, if not everyone agrees, more flexible groups of member states can take the lead. We did this with Schengen or with the Euro,” Kos added.

She underlined the protection of democratic values and the rule of law.

“We must make sure that the new member states always respect our democratic values and the rule of law. We are proposing safeguard measures to make it easier to react if new members breach their obligations. If necessary, this could mean cutting funding or suspending certain rights,” Kos stated.

Kos explains that enlargement must be adapted to the current geopolitical realities.

“We must adapt enlargement to the realities of today’s world order. Preparation for EU membership takes time. But those who want to weaken Europe will not give us that time. They exert political pressure, create dependencies, exploit insecurity and spread fake news. When countries are put under pressure because they choose Europe, we must stand by them.

This is why we want to move away from the ‘all or nothing’ logic in enlargement. We can do this by integrating countries that carry out reforms into parts of our Union even before accession. We can expand the freedoms of our common market and remove the barriers that divide current and future member states.

This is good for businesses on both sides. Because the choices countries make today on security, energy, critical materials or artificial intelligence will shape Europe for decades to come. So let us make these choices together,” Kos concluded.

She described this approach as a set of ideas to start the discussion on how the European Union can prepare today for a stronger Europe tomorrow.

Together with Member States, we have made more progress on enlargement in the last two years than in the past two decades.

It is now time to prepare for a larger Union.

This requires realism and pragmatism.

That is exactly what the Communication we published today brings.

A concrete assessment of the impact of enlargement on our Union.

And operational actions to guide our next steps.

— Marta Kos (@MartaKosEU) October 6, 2026