After 17 and eight years of waiting respectively, North Macedonia and Albania opened their EU accession negotiations on Tuesday 19 July.
“This is a historic moment”, stressed European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen ahead of the first two Intergovernmental Conferences of the two countries. “Any comment now cannot balance the extraordinary weight this decision has for Albania”, Prime Minister Edi Rama summed up, and his Macedonian counterpart Dimitar Kovačevski also used...