The European Commission’s 2026 enlargement package puts Montenegro, Albania, Moldova, and Ukraine on accession road maps. The harder test is ratification by 27 member-states.
On 4 November the European Commission adopted its annual enlargement package, and for the first time since Croatia joined in 2013 a candidate is close enough to membership for work on its accession treaty to be well under way. The package gives the four most advanced candidates (Montenegro, Albania, Moldova, and Ukraine) indicative road maps for the year ahead and sets out how they can be drawn into EU policies before they join. As the candidates move closer, the decisive steps pass from the Commission to the 27 member-states, each of which can still slow or stop the process.
What happened: four frontrunners, but only one close to the finish
The package released yesterday assesses ten countries:
Montenegro has provisionally closed 21 of its 33 negotiating chapters and, subject to member-states’ agreement, could close the rest by the end of the year, with Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign-policy chief, saying that Montenegro has a clear path to signing its accession treaty by next summer.
Albania has opened its last cluster and provisionally closed four chapters, with the aim of concluding negotiations by 2027.
Moldova and Ukraine each opened four clusters over the past year, and the Commission judges both ready to open the rest. Ukraine’s path still runs through Budapest. Its clusters 2 and 3 opened on 13 October only after Kyiv amended its education law to meet Hungarian demands on minority rights, and Hungary has yet to approve the screening results needed to open clusters 4 and 5.
Serbia made no substantive progress.
North Macedonia is still working towards the opening benchmarks for its first cluster and has yet to adopt the constitutional amendments it committed to undertake.
Bosnia and Herzegovina continues to declare EU integration a strategic goal while, the Commission finds, “increasingly disengaging from its EU path”.
Kosovo saw its reform process stall amid a prolonged institutional crisis, although the Commission has lifted its measures against it and resumed financial assistance.
Türkiye remains a candidate, but the Commission finds that the gap between its declared objective of joining and its backsliding on the political criteria has widened further, and that the reasons for the 2018 standstill in negotiations remain unaddressed.
Georgia remains, in the Commission’s words, a “candidate country in name only”.
