The EU Council’s Hungarian presidency failed to garner unanimous support among member states for opening the next stage of negotiations about Serbia’s EU accession during a debate on Monday, November 25th.
Despite the European Commission’s assessment declaring Belgrade as “technically ready” to advance, its strained relationship with Kosovo and continued refusal to sanction Russia remain unbridgeable obstacles in the eyes of several capitals.
According to unnamed diplomats cited by Euronews, the countries most opposed to Serbia taking the next steps toward full EU membership were Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Sweden.
The Budapest-introduced proposal debated was meant to bring Serbia closer to opening Cluster 3 of the accession process, which covers eight individual reform chapters linked to competitiveness and economic growth, such as taxation, monetary policy, customs union, R&D, and employment.
Serbia successfully unlocked five of these eight chapters years ago, but Brussels changed the rules in 2020, creating thematic clusters that can only be opened as a whole after meeting certain preliminary benchmarks.
These have all been met, as per the Commission, so all that’s left for Cluster 3 negotiations to be opened is a unanimous green light from the EU Commission.
Although acknowledging the progress made by Serbia in the past years, the opposing countries insisted on “concrete results” in Belgrade’s foreign policy alignment with the EU. In particular, they brought up Serbia’s consistent refusal to join EU sanctions against Russia, as well as its recently implemented free trade agreement with China.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, however, is not “ashamed” of maintaining “traditionally very good ties” with Moscow given the two nations’ historical friendship, which no administration in Belgrade could overwrite without committing political suicide. “Nobody in Europe agrees with me on this issue, but everybody in Europe understands my position,” Vučić said in September.
Hungary has repeatedly stated that one of the main objectives of its Council presidency would be advancing the EU accession process of the West Balkan countries. Budapest insists that enlargement should be strictly a “merit-based” process, but the outcome of Monday’s meeting also shows that most countries’ decisions remain intrinsically political.
“We promised the Western Balkan countries twenty years ago that they would be given entry, and it is time to fulfill the promise,” Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán said.
Budapest is also a great supporter of Moldova’s EU accession, as well as Schengen’s enlargement into Romania and Bulgaria, both of which it worked toward during its six-month presidency. Its opposition toward Ukraine’s EU accession bid is based on the country’s wildly different circumstances, which again play into the ‘merit vs politics’ debate.
