EU enlargement report puts Montenegro on track to join by 2028

The European Commission said on Wednesday that Montenegro has moved closer than any other candidate country to joining the European Union, as it published its annual assessment of the bloc's enlargement process. The 2026 Enlargement Package credits the small Adriatic nation of roughly 620,000 people with having provisionally closed 21 of the 35 negotiating chapters required for membership, and says the remaining 14 could be closed by the end of this year if member states agree.

The package, which also assesses Albania, Serbia, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Turkey, Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, singles out Montenegro, Albania, Moldova and Ukraine as the four candidates making the clearest progress. For the first time, the Commission attached an indicative roadmap to each of their files, setting milestones for the coming year rather than leaving the pace of talks open-ended.

A target of 2028, and a first since Croatia

Montenegro applied for EU membership in 2008, was granted candidate status in December 2010, and opened formal accession negotiations in June 2012. According to the Commission's country page, it is now the only candidate close enough to a final deal that officials are discussing an actual signing date for an accession treaty, rather than a general direction of travel. Commissioner for Enlargement Marta Kos said the country could become the first candidate to conclude accession negotiations since Croatia did so in 2011, two years before it became the EU's 28th member.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen framed the package as evidence that the bloc's enlargement machinery, dormant for much of the past decade, is working again: "Step by step, we are building a more complete, stronger Union." High Representative Kaja Kallas, who doubles as a Commission vice-president, put it in more strategic terms, telling reporters that "enlargement is a direct investment in Europe's security."

"Montenegro is the closest to the finish line with a clear path to signing the accession treaty by next summer," Kallas said.

Under that timeline, reported by Balkan Insight and detailed in the Commission's Montenegro Report 2026, negotiations could formally conclude as early as December, with the legal text of an accession treaty drafted over the winter and signed around June 2027. Ratification by the parliaments of all 27 current member states would likely push actual membership to 2028 at the earliest — the date Montenegrin and EU officials have both cited publicly, while cautioning it is not guaranteed.

Croatia's wartime grievances stand in the way

The obstacle is not Montenegro's reform record alone. Croatia, the most recent Balkan country to join the EU, has for roughly two years withheld the unanimous consent needed to close two of Montenegro's remaining chapters — one covering transport policy, the other foreign, security and judicial affairs — pending resolution of bilateral disputes that predate Montenegro's EU bid entirely. Zagreb has linked its position to unresolved issues from the 1990s Yugoslav wars, including the prosecution of war crimes, the treatment of ethnic Croats in Montenegro, restitution of seized property, and an unsettled maritime border in the Bay of Kotor, according to reporting compiled by Brussels Signal and other outlets tracking the talks through the year. Croatian officials have also raised commercial concerns about competition from Montenegrin road-haulage firms.

Kallas has publicly pressed Zagreb not to let bilateral quarrels hold up the broader accession process, and diplomats say Germany has lobbied Croatia along similar lines. Croatia's government maintains it supports Montenegro's EU bid in principle while insisting Podgorica resolve the outstanding disputes first. The standoff has a precedent with an uncomfortable ending: Slovenia blocked Croatia's own accession talks for months in 2008 and 2009 over a maritime border dispute, which was only resolved years later through international arbitration that Zagreb ultimately rejected.

Who else is in the package, and who is falling behind

For the three other "frontrunners" named alongside Montenegro, the report is more a progress note than a finish line. Albania opened its last remaining cluster of chapters and met benchmarks that could allow four more to close; Prime Minister Edi Rama called the findings "another step forward" for his government, which is aiming to conclude its own talks by 2027. Ukraine and Moldova, both of which opened accession talks in 2024 under EU fast-tracking prompted by Russia's invasion, each opened four negotiating clusters over the past year; the Commission said Ukraine's anti-corruption institutions continue to function despite wartime pressure, and that both countries have met the conditions to open their remaining clusters.

The rest of the report reads more bleakly. Serbia, the report says, made no substantive progress in its accession talks over the assessment period, with Kos citing backsliding on free expression and academic freedom; the Commission called on Belgrade's new government, formed after elections that ended the long rule of the Serbian Progressive Party, to reverse the trend. Bosnia and Herzegovina is described as "increasingly disengaging" from its EU path despite continuing to call membership a strategic goal, while North Macedonia's bid remains stalled by Bulgaria's demand that it recognize a Bulgarian minority in its constitution. Georgia's accession process is, in the Commission's words, now "de facto halted," with Brussels describing it as a candidate country "in name only" amid what it calls the ruling party's erosion of democratic institutions. Turkey, whose candidacy dates to 1999 and whose accession talks opened in 2005, is described as having widened the gap between its stated EU ambitions and continuing prosecutions of opposition politicians, including Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu.

The package also sets out a broader shift in how Brussels wants to manage enlargement. Rather than treating membership as a single binary event at the end of years of negotiation, the Commission is proposing what it calls a common framework for "gradual integration," under which candidate countries would be folded into specific EU policy areas — energy markets, transport networks, digital regulation and defence cooperation among them — ahead of full membership. Dialogues on gradual integration with individual candidates are due to begin within six months, according to the EU's delegation in Podgorica, which published its own summary of the findings alongside the Commission. The approach follows a Commission communication earlier this year titled "Preparing for a wider Union," and is meant partly to give candidate countries and their citizens tangible benefits before accession itself, and partly to reassure current member states nervous about admitting new countries while the bloc's own institutions remain designed for a smaller membership.

The Commission's report leans on figures from the EU's existing support programs to make the case that enlargement pays off for both sides. It points to a €6 billion Growth Plan for the Western Balkans, a €1.9 billion facility for Moldova, and the €50 billion Ukraine Facility, and argues that the EU's 2004 enlargement round — which added ten countries, mostly from the former communist bloc — roughly doubled living standards in the new member states, nearly halved unemployment there, and created six million jobs across the bloc as a whole.

What happens next

Montenegro's next formal test comes at the level of EU ambassadors and foreign ministers, who must unanimously agree to close each remaining negotiating chapter — a process the Commission's roadmap envisions finishing this year, assuming the Croatia dispute is resolved and no other member state raises a late objection. The Council of the EU, meeting through its General Affairs configuration, is expected to take up the remaining chapters in the coming weeks. If those closures go ahead, drafting of the accession treaty would begin in earnest, with a signing ceremony targeted for next summer and ratification votes in all 27 national parliaments — plus the European Parliament's consent — to follow over the following year.

Montenegrin officials, including Prime Minister Milojko Spajić, have said the government intends to finish its own domestic work on schedule and have called on the EU side to match that pace. Whether it does will depend less on Podgorica's reform record, which the Commission now rates among the strongest of any candidate, than on whether Zagreb and Podgorica can settle disputes dating back more than three decades before the window the Commission has opened closes again.