On Monday 9 September, the Commissioner for Enlargement, Olivér Várhelyi, said that enlargement would be one of the major issues for the next European Commission.
“I think that our discussion in the next mandate will be very much shaped by the topic of enlargement”, he explained in Budapest at the Interparliamentary Conference for the Common Foreign and Security Policy and the Common Security and Defence Policy - ‘The Future Europe and the countries wishing to Join the EU’. He said he was “convinced” that the next Commission should be an enlargement Commission, which would “pave the way for the next wave of enlargement at the end of its mandate”.
In his view, “it is no longer the question whether we will have enlargement, the question is when we will have enlargement”.
The Commissioner stressed that the geopolitical and security situation in Europe had made enlargement “inevitable”. “Inevitable, because there is no peace, prosperity or security in Europe without enlargement”, he explained. In his view, the faster enlargement happens “the faster we make this geopolitical investment to fortify and consolidate the fundamentals for our long-term peace, stability, security, and prosperity throughout our continent”.
“Enlargement is and will remain at the top of the political agenda, because the European project will not be complete without the accession of our friends in the Balkans and the East”, stressed Mr Várhelyi.
Although there has been no enlargement under his mandate, the Commissioner recalled the progress made in this area over the last five years. In 2019, seven countries were “enlargement partners”, whereas today there are ten (Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine and Turkey). “We had five candidate countries, and now there are nine. EU accession negotiations have been opened with three countries by 2019, and as of today, we have eight countries included in the accession negotiations process", he added. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)