Few EU files matter as much as enlargement, and few are followed as little. Any new Member State would change which countries pay into the EU budget and who draws from it, which regions qualify for development funding, how farm subsidies are divided, and the arithmetic behind every future EU decision.
EU-wide support for enlargement sits at 53%, and the subject features in almost no national election campaigns. There is a structural reason for that. Enlargement has no single moment, launch date, deadline, or vote until the very end. It advances through technical working parties, screening reports and progress assessments. It becomes publicly visible only at the very end, when treaties reach national parliaments and, in some countries, national referendums. That is precisely the point at which enlargement becomes hardest to stop, or hardest to salvage.
This opinion piece looks at both halves of the problem. The first is external: where each candidate stands, who is genuinely moving and who has stalled, the (possibly) joint fates of Ukraine and Moldova, and what to draw from Iceland, a country that has just decided membership negotiations are not worth pursuing. The second is internal: divisions among Member States and their electorates and where the decisive vote will ultimately be cast. The aim is to leave you with a clear view of the barriers in the way and the specific moments when, if something is going to happen, it will happen.
The External Picture
Montenegro: the test case nobody can afford to fail
Montenegro is no longer a theoretical EU candidate. As of July 2026, it has provisionally closed 18 of its 33 negotiating chapters with the EU, including six this year alone. Prime Minister Milojko Spajić has been explicit about his preferred timeline: he wants the technical work concluded in 2026, with membership in 2028.
Membership is negotiated in policy ‘chapters’: competition, food safety, energy, taxation, and so on, and a chapter closes only once the candidate can show that its laws meet EU standards, that the institutions enforcing them work in practice and that the investments needed to comply are credibly planned. Montenegro says the remaining areas will soon be compliant, and more chapters can close soon.
Montenegro is a small country of 626,000 people, but it also has the potential to be the EU’s proof of concept. If a small, broadly compliant, politically willing candidate can be brought across the line on a predictable timetable, the accession process regains credibility. If it cannot, the message to every other capital in the queue is that the destination does not exist. Domestic expectations have already shifted: 62% of Montenegrins now expect to join within five years, up from 39% a year earlier. That’s a lot of political capital riding on a treaty that still has to pass 27 ratifications among the current Member States.
Albania: the fastest mover in the region
Albania closed its first three negotiating chapters in July 2026: science and research, education and culture, and external relations. Those are modest chapters, with far less contention than matters concerning financial institutions, energy and farming, but a genuine threshold, nonetheless.
Albania aims to conclude the remaining 30 negotiating chapters by the end of 2027. That is an aggressive timeline, given the tricky chapters are still ahead. The 33 chapters are bundled into six clusters, groups of related policy chapters that open and close as a package, and the EU insists that Cluster 1 – Fundamentals, covering courts, corruption, fundamental rights, and democratic institutions, is the first to open and the last to close. The EU’s logic is deliberate: a candidate should not be able to bank easy technical wins while its judiciary or its freedom of the press is going backwards.
That cluster and the environment are where Albania’s difficulty will land. Meeting EU environmental standards on water, waste and air quality is the most expensive undertaking any candidate faces, and progress is measured in built infrastructure rather than laws passed. Both areas are already generating friction domestically: public support for membership is extraordinary at 92% in favour, the highest of any candidate country, but Albanians have been protesting over precisely these two issues. Albania’s constraint is not political will. It is administrative capacity, and a sequencing rule that keeps the hardest questions open until the very end.
Moldova: the candidate most likely to be decoupled
Moldova and Ukraine applied for EU membership within days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the EU has treated them as a single political package ever since. That pairing has held procedurally: both opened Cluster 1 – Fundamentals in June 2026 and, a month later, the cluster covering foreign and trade policy, widely considered to be the least demanding of the six. Both therefore have four clusters left, and neither has yet begun closing chapters.
What has changed is the language around them. At the EU-Moldova summit in June 2026, Commission President von der Leyen observed that “once the first cluster is open, every candidate country is responsible for itself, because they have to deliver different reforms.” European Council President Costa has also praised Moldova’s pace of delivery, which can be interpreted as a subtle indication that Moldova and Ukraine are on diverging tracks.
Decoupling the two countries would mean letting Moldova advance on its own merits rather than waiting for Ukraine, whose progress is made extraordinarily difficult by war and is anyway held hostage to a Hungarian veto to their accession. For several Member States, decoupling is the rational decision; however, it has not been taken, because separating them mid-war would tell Kyiv that its application is no longer the EU’s political priority.
In Moldova, support for membership runs at 58%, lower than in any Western Balkans candidate except Serbia. When Moldovans voted in October 2024 on writing EU accession into their constitution, the measure passed by a very narrow margin of 10,000 votes out of 1.5 million cast. Moldova is simultaneously the most reform-willing candidate in the Eastern neighbourhood and one where domestic politics over EU membership could halt or reverse with a single election.
Ukraine: special in every respect
Ukraine’s technical accession position is stronger than most would expect of a country under invasion, and the EU’s MFF 2028-2034 budget proposal already earmarks around €100 billion for Ukrainian reconstruction and pre-accession support.
Political will is where progress halts. At a Council working party on enlargement in September 2026, Hungary refused to approve the screening results (the assessment of how far Ukraine’s laws already match the EU) for Clusters 2 – Internal Market and 3 – Competitiveness and Inclusive Growth. These were the third and fourth such refusals. Hungary’s condition is the treatment of the Hungarian minority in Zakarpattia, in western Ukraine, though it has not specified which legislative steps it expects from Kyiv.
What makes this significant is that it is happening after a change of government in Budapest. New Prime Minister Péter Magyar’s administration has been markedly more constructive on Ukraine funding and on EU policy generally, and it did allow Clusters 1 – Fundamentals and Cluster 6 – External Relations, to open. But it did so in exchange for extensive minority-rights guarantees and, crucially, a pledge to hold a legally binding national referendum on Ukrainian membership once all 33 chapters are complete.
Ukraine’s other complication is that accession implies applying the acquis across a defined territory with defined borders; a security commitment by implication if not by treaty; and admitting an agricultural producer of a size the Common Agricultural Policy was never designed to absorb. Ukraine would be a substantial net recipient, and its farm sector is large enough that analysts question whether the EU’s subsidy model could survive its accession intact, which makes its membership a budget question as much as a security one.
President Zelenskyy has been asking for a target date for accession. The EU’s difficulty is that it cannot offer a date without answering those big questions first. German Chancellor Merz’s floated concept of “associate membership” or second-tier membership can be interpreted as an attempt to give Ukraine something real without answering them.
The stalled middle: Serbia, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Kosovo
Serbia is an example of backsliding. In July 2026, eight Member States — reportedly including the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, Estonia, Lithuania and Croatia, with accounts of the full list differing, opposed opening Cluster 3 – Competitiveness and Inclusive Growth. Those countries cited rule-of-law deterioration in Serbia and non-alignment with the EU regarding sanctions against Russia.
The EU Commission has withheld Growth Plan payments over the contested judicial laws. Serbia amended rather than repealed them in June 2026, leaving key recommendations on the organised-crime and high-tech-crime prosecutors’ offices unimplemented. Serbian domestic support for membership stands at 31%, the lowest of any candidate. Serbia is the clearest case in which the barrier is political will rather than capacity.
North Macedonia remains hostage to bilateral conditionality. Under the 2022 deal that lifted Bulgaria’s veto on opening talks, North Macedonia committed to recognising its Bulgarian minority in its constitution’s preamble, but it carried Bulgaria’s implication that Macedonian identity is derived from Bulgarian. For the current North Macedonian government, that is a concession too far, particularly while Bulgaria refuses to register Macedonian associations, conduct the European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly found to violate the freedom of association guaranteed by the European Convention, in judgments Bulgaria has left unimplemented for nearly two decades.
North Macedonia also doubts the concession would buy anything durable. The negotiating framework also ties progress to a joint historical commission and a bilateral treaty, with no agreed test for compliance, leaving Bulgaria to judge when its own conditions have been met. So, the process stalls, regardless of what North Macedonia achieves elsewhere. As with Hungary and Ukraine, one Member State’s domestic politics can suspend another country’s future indefinitely, and the candidate has no way to earn its way out.
Bosnia and Herzegovina shows what happens when the obstacle is the state itself rather than any particular reform. It became a candidate in December 2022, and in March 2024 the EU agreed that talks could open once a set of outstanding conditions covering the judiciary, corruption and public administration was met. They remain outstanding.
The underlying problem is structural within Bosnia’s post-war constitution, which divides power between two entities – one of which is Serb and has far less support for the EU – and a rotating three-member presidency; so simply producing a single agreed state-level position is itself the hurdle. The consequences are now financial. The EU’s Growth Plan for the Western Balkans pays out against delivered reforms rather than promises, and Bosnia has an allocation of roughly €977 million that it is failing to draw down. It has not fully implemented a single one of the 113 commitments it signed up to, has yet to receive even the first €70 million tranche, and has several hundred million euros due to expire in December 2026. Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos has stated there will be no extension.
Kosovo’s problem is recognition. It applied for EU membership in December 2022, and the application has never been forwarded to the Commission for the formal opinion that would begin the process, so Kosovo remains a “potential candidate” with no chapters open and no realistic prospect of any. The reason is that every step of accession requires unanimity from the Member States, and five of them — Spain, Slovakia, Cyprus, Romania and Greece — do not recognise Kosovo as a state, largely because of their own domestic sensitivities about secession.
Kosovo nonetheless has a trade and association agreement with the EU in force since 2016 and visa-free travel to the Schengen area since January 2024, which are real integration measures, but on a track that does not lead to EU membership. Normalisation talks with Serbia, to which both capitals’ progress is formally tied, are going nowhere. 83% of Kosovars support joining the EU, but the country has no institutional route in which their enthusiasm will matter.
Georgia and Türkiye: candidates in name
Georgia is the clearest case of a government moving in the opposite direction to its own population, with public support for EU membership at 71%.
The EU moved first: after Georgia’s parliament passed a Russian-style “foreign influence” law in May 2024, EU leaders declared the accession process had come to a de facto halt, though they never formally withdrew the candidate status granted only months earlier. Georgia then went further. In November 2024, the government announced it would not pursue accession talks until the end of 2028 and would decline EU grants, a decision that led Georgians to protest openly in the streets for weeks. The EU Commission’s 2025 assessment described it as a candidate country in name only.
Türkiye’s accession talks have been frozen since 2018, and no Member State proposes to unfreeze them. Publicly, Türkiye blames the EU for the impasse. But the reforms that opened negotiations in 2005 have since been substantially reversed, and the Commission’s 2025 report finds the judiciary still under executive control and backsliding resumed. That said, the live EU-Türkiye agenda is customs union modernisation, visa liberalisation benchmarks, and security cooperation, all areas the two partners seek further cooperation on, but none aimed at accession.
Iceland: the road not taken
On 29 August 2026, Iceland voted against resuming accession negotiations by 52.84% to 47.16%, on a voter turnout of 82.5% of the voting population.
Icelanders No Vote was not a rejection of Europe; they were declining a specific trade. Through the EEA, the country already has access to most of the single market and is in Schengen on top of that, while retaining national control over what membership would touch: fisheries, agriculture, and monetary policy. No Campaigners argued that EU accession offered incremental economic gain in exchange for the assets Icelanders were least willing to pool.
Many referendum watchers pointed to fisheries policy as the key issue. Seafood accounts for roughly 39% of Iceland’s goods exports and around 8% of GDP once fishing processing is counted, and the Common Fisheries Policy would move quota decisions to Brussels. EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos acknowledged that “Iceland’s unique specificities on fisheries and agriculture are well known” and that they “would have to be carefully considered” if negotiations resumed. However, the EU could not promise a derogation before negotiations had even begun.
The Yes Campaign ran on the global picture, including instability in the Arctic, trade conflict, American designs on neighbouring Greenland, and the long-standing cost of running one of the world’s smallest independent currencies. These were serious arguments, but they were future-tense and probabilistic, set against a present-tense and quantifiable loss.
The Yes Campaign prominently used the slogan ‘Yes To See’ to encourage Icelanders to vote yes and at least hear the EU out on whether a fishing derogation was possible, before dismissing the idea of accession. Ultimately, this proved insufficient.
For the EU, the damage is to the premise that enlargement is a geopolitical necessity and that membership largely sells itself. Iceland tested that proposition in unusually favourable conditions. A wealthy, aligned democracy, in a campaign fought against the backdrop of global and Arctic instability, and the case for membership still lost. If the geopolitical security argument cannot win a referendum in Iceland, it is unlikely to win one elsewhere.
More awkwardly, Iceland has demonstrated the appeal of the EEA and Schengen halfway house at precisely the moment Member States are considering constructing one. Iceland has now joined Norway, which rejected membership twice, in concluding that the arrangement is enough, and its decision might signal to other candidate countries that such a position is enough, or indeed, optimal.
The Internal Picture
The EU Public
EU-wide support for enlargement stood at 53% in the EU’s Standard Eurobarometer of March and April 2026. However, aggregating across the EU conceals the real problem.
Support for enlargement runs at 71% in Spain, 67% in Croatia, 64% in Romania, 63% in Slovakia and 62% in Poland and Slovenia. On the other hand, opposition to enlargement runs at 54% in France, 57% in Austria, 54% in Czechia and 53% in Germany. Hungary, whose government has done more than any other to slow the process, records 58% support for EU enlargement.
Enlargement enjoys solid majorities in much of the south and east, and minority support in several of the large net contributors whose parliaments must ratify. Citizens’ concerns cluster consistently around migration, corruption and crime, and cost.
Three camps and a set of blockers
Member State positions divide into three groups, plus a category of its own.
The pro-enlargement camp treats accession as a geopolitical necessity and delay as a strategic risk in itself. It includes the Nordics and Baltics, much of Central Europe, Italy, Croatia and Spain, and it has the European Council’s declaratory language on its side.
The reform-first camp does not oppose enlargement; it opposes enlargement before the Union is restructured to absorb it. France, the Netherlands and Austria are the clearest voices, anchored in the 2023 Granada principle that both the EU and future members must be ready. The underlying questions of how a Union of 30-plus states decides anything by unanimity, and what happens to cohesion and agricultural receipts when large, poorer members join, are serious and legitimate concerns. They are also infinitely extendable, which is what makes “reform first” so effective as a brake.
The safeguards camp is the most striking development of 2026. Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg have asked for a catalogue of options for tougher safeguards in future Accession Treaties: suspension of funds and voting rights for legal breaches, mandatory participation in the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, and extended transitional periods including temporary limits on labour-market access. In opposition, in July 2026, seven Member States, led by Italy, pushed back against restricting new members’ rights. The underlying subtext is the consequences of admitting a country that then backslides, which the EU has experienced with several Member States to varying degrees over the years.
The blockers are a separate category, because their objections are bilateral rather than programmatic: Hungary on Ukraine, Bulgaria on North Macedonia, the five non-recognisers on Kosovo, Greece and Cyprus on Türkiye. None of those issues will be resolved through a better accession methodology.
Underneath it all is a Franco-German idea of building a structured “gradual integration”, a tiered EU membership that admits candidates to specific policies and market segments based on performance, reversible in case of backsliding, ahead of full membership. Its stated scope is the Western Balkans and Moldova, notably not Ukraine. It is the most likely landing zone precisely because multiple camps can claim victory, and it is by design not an answer to the question of membership itself. However, for candidate countries that have spent great effort and cost to meet the EU’s standards to become full members, this can feel like a slap in the face.
The veto is migrating
The most important shift in the internal debate is about where the decisive vote takes place.
Accession involves two different kinds of decisions. The first is the sequence of steps during the negotiations, of opening a cluster or closing a chapter, each of which requires the unanimous agreement of all 27 governments. This is where Hungary has blocked Ukraine and Bulgaria has blocked North Macedonia, and it is what three years of reform proposals have tried to fix, mostly by shifting intermediate steps to majority voting so one capital cannot stall a process over an unrelated grievance.
The second is ratification. Once negotiations conclude, the accession treaty must be approved by the European Parliament, the candidate country, and every single Member State under its own constitutional rules. This is Article 49 of the EU treaty, and there is no procedural workaround for it whatsoever. Twenty-seven parliaments, and in some cases twenty-seven electorates.
That is why Hungary’s manoeuvre on Ukraine matters more than it appears. Hungary traded away a Council veto the EU was actively working to circumvent, and secured in exchange a legally binding national referendum, which cannot be circumvented at all.
France carries a similar risk by design. A 2005 constitutional amendment requires a referendum to ratify any future accession treaty; a 2008 revision allows parliament to authorise ratification instead, but only by a three-fifths majority in both chambers. The requirement exempts accessions negotiated from conferences convened before July 2004, which covered Croatia. Montenegro’s negotiations opened in 2012, so it falls squarely inside it. Austrian and Dutch politics carry comparable, if less formalised, risk. And Iceland has just demonstrated what happens when a technical case meets an emotive campaign.
Every workaround at the Council table moves the decision closer to the point where workarounds run out.
Where to watch
Four points will decide whether enlargement moves in the next 18 months. The European Council’s discussion on 15 October 2026 is the first proper leaders’ debate on methodology and internal reform: watch whether gradual integration and the safeguards catalogue win political blessing, or whether the conclusions are again drafted to avoid deciding. The Commission’s autumn enlargement package will then frame every Council decision that follows, including whether Montenegro’s negotiations can be called substantively complete.
Montenegro’s Accession Treaty, from late 2026 into 2027, is where the process stops being about candidates and becomes about Member States. That will also serve as the first real test in over a decade of whether all 27 can ratify domestically. Finally, for Moldova, formal decoupling from Ukraine, if it comes, would give them a credible accession date.
A final thought
Enlargement now has two speeds, and they are diverging. The candidates closest to the front, Montenegro, Albania, Moldova, are moving faster than at any point since 2013. The Union’s capacity to receive them has not changed, and the barriers are shifting from the negotiating table to national ratification, where they are considerably harder to remove.
For businesses and organisations, this is not an abstract diplomatic story. Accession is a regulatory event: new markets adopting the acquis, transitional periods that shape competitive conditions for years, pre-accession funding worth tens of billions, procurement frameworks opening, standards applied in new jurisdictions and, under gradual integration, sectoral market access arriving well before membership. Whoever understands which sectors open first, and where, will be positioned before the market notices.
At Lykke Advice, this is exactly what we do: tracking how political processes become regulatory and commercial reality, identifying the institutions and Member States that will decide the outcome, and helping clients position early rather than react late. If enlargement affects your market access strategy or supply chains, now is the time to map it. Contact us at info@lykkeadvice.eu.
