Macedonia, Albania Hail EU Approval for Accession Talks
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| Photo: EPA-EFE/STEPHANIE LECOCQ |
Macedonian and Albanian leaders on Wednesday welcomed the decision by European ministers to give a conditional green light to the start of their EU accession talks.
“There will be sweat, tears and many disappointments but we will succeed!” Macedonian Foreign Minister Nikola Dimitrov wrote on Facebook.
“Now we will climb a mountain road, narrow and steep, marred by rain and ghastly wind, but we will succeed,” he added.
Macedonia’s Prime Minister Zoran Zaev said it was great news for the country and offered a major “motivation” for achieving a “European Macedonia”.
After a long debate at Tuesday’s meeting in Luxembourg among the bloc’s European affairs ministers, it was decided that Albania and Macedonia’s EU accession talks will start in June next year, depending on certain conditions being fulfilled.
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama said that “after 72 hours of stormy debate”, the decision was a victory.
“This initial skirmish is won, and now the real battle begins,” Rama wrote on Twitter.
Albania and Macedonia hope the decision will clear the way for approval by EU leaders at their summit on June 28-29.
EU Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn said after the meeting that the decision was a “key signal to the region that progress is rewarded”.
The decision was also “crucial for the EU’s own credibility”, Hahn wrote on Twitter.
While most EU member states supported opening the accession talks immediately, France and The Netherlands opposed the move, saying they first wanted to see Macedonia and Albania sustain their reforms.
The two countries were given several key conditions to meet before starting the talks.
They include judicial reforms, active investigations into and verdicts in high-level corruption cases, reforms to the intelligence and security sectors and public administration reform.
Comment on the fact that the recommendation for Albania and Macedonia will not be as unconditional as they had hoped, Simonida Kacarska, head of the European Policy Institute, a Skopje-based think tank, said that this was down to “France’s insistence that some of these important issues cannot be decided before the European parliament elections set for 2019”, she told Deutsche Welle on Wednesday.
Arguably the most important condition for Macedonia is the implementation of the recent deal with Greece, under which the country should change its name to the Republic of North Macedonia.
In the Balkan region, Greece was the first to join the EU back in 1981. Slovenia came next, in 2004, while Romania and bulgaria followed suit in 2007. Croatia joined in 2013.
Currently, two other states in the region are conducting accession negotiations, Montenegro and Serbia.
That leaves only Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, which hs unresolved status issues with neighbouring Serbia – and with five EU states that have not recognised its independence.
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