EU Commission poised to formally back Albania's 2027 accession deadline

The Commission is set to formally back Albania's 2027 accession deadline in a new roadmap, which is also due to include a list of key deliverables Tirana will have to prioritise to complete the process by the end of next year. The European Commission is working towards closing the books on Albania's accession process by December 2027 — a timeline Tirana has long touted, and that is now set to receive formal recognition in the EU's upcoming enlargement roadmaps, EU officials told Euronews. The Commission is preparing a roadmap to confirm Albania's stated goal of closing all negotiating chapters by the end of next year, and to lay out priority deliverables to plug the remaining accession gaps. Albania has set the end of 2027 as its target for completing accession negotiations, a timetable Prime Minister Edi Rama and other senior officials have repeatedly described as an agreed plan with the European Commission. But while Commission officials have backed the ambition, the EU executive does not typically set deadlines for accession, since enlargement is meant to be a merits-based process. "As you know, enlargement doesn't work with dates. But the more the country is coming towards the end of the technical part of the accession, the more we can say about it or the more we can use the years," Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos said in July. That is set to change soon. 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 be proposing roadmaps for the candidates that have made most progress," von der Leyen said, mentioning Ukraine, Moldova and the Western Balkans as countries whose future lies in the EU. The roadmaps are expected to set out 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 folded into the Commission's enlargement package, its annual health check on the accession process, expected in late October, which also includes country-specific assessments and recommendations for next steps. In this context, the Commission is drafting a closing benchmark assessment report that assesses whether a candidate country has met the benchmarks set for it to be considered to have met accession requirements, notably in justice and the rule of law, the so-called "fundamentals." In Albania's case, the plan is to include a list of key deliverables spelling out the reforms and measures needed to close the remaining benchmark gaps. That was already the case for Montenegro, where the Commission used the closing-benchmark process to pin down the concrete reforms and results it needed to deliver. The deliverables list is meant to clearly signal to candidate countries where the priorities lie, pushing them to complete the missing steps. "Essentially, the Commission saw that this approach worked well with Montenegro and they want to replicate it," an EU official told Euronews, asking to remain anonymous given the sensitivity of the discussion.