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European Commission will support Albania's plan for membership by 2027

2026-09-23 18:19:48Politikë SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
European Commission will support Albania's plan for membership by 2027
Marta Kos

The European Commission is expected to officially support Albania's 2027 membership deadline with a new action plan, which is also expected to include a list of key deliverables that Tirana will need to prioritize to complete the process by the end of next year.

The European Commission is working towards closing Albania's accession process by December 2027, a deadline that Tirana has long mentioned and which is now expected to receive official recognition in the EU's upcoming enlargement roadmaps, EU officials told Euronews .

The Commission is preparing an action plan to confirm Albania's stated intention to close all negotiation chapters by the end of next year, and to define priority deliverables to fill 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.

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

"As you know, enlargement does not work with dates. But the closer a country is 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, citing Ukraine, Moldova and the Western Balkans as countries whose future lies in the EU.

The roadmaps are expected to set 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.

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

In this context, the Commission is drafting a final standards assessment report that assesses whether a candidate country has met the standards set to be considered to have fulfilled the accession requirements, particularly in justice and the rule of law, the so-called "fundamentals".

In the case of Albania, the plan is to include a list of key outcomes that define the reforms and measures needed to close the remaining standards gaps.

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

The list of results is intended 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.


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