What looked like progress a year ago is now facing an impasse: neither Belgrade nor Pristina are ready to implement the Ohrid agreement that the EU negotiated with them last March, and are instead putting their hopes for leadership changes in Europe and the US to rekindle the dialogue, writes the independent pan-European media network, specialized in EU affairs, Euractiv.
His counterpart from Kosovo, Albin Kurti, is delaying the implementation of the long-agreed Association of Serb-majority municipalities in northern Kosovo, which Pristina says violates the constitution and fears it could fail as a system of Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The terms of the Ohrid agreement are now included in the current EU accession negotiations with Belgrade, in Chapter 35, after EU ambassadors unanimously agreed to this step in mid-April.
Over the past year, EU diplomats have grown increasingly impatient with the lack of progress, as even the combined efforts of Brussels and Washington have failed to achieve tangible results.
This lack of progress, they say, is because Belgrade and Pristina have adopted a “wait and see” approach regarding the outcome of the European elections in June and the US presidential election in November.
Vucic, in particular, has been playing for some time, with Belgrade hoping for the return of former US President Donald Trump to the White House.
In his first term, it was Trump’s envoys who supported a territory swap between Kosovo and Serbia in 2018, which Vucic and then-Kosovo President Hashim Thaçi had negotiated.
The effort failed mainly due to resistance from Germany, which did not want to see any new border changes. With Trump, Vucic hopes, there may be another solution.
The US special envoy for the Western Balkans, Gabriel Escobar, leaves his post at the end of this month, and who will replace him remains unclear.
The EU Special Representative for negotiations between Serbia and Kosovo, Miroslav Lajcak, was on his farewell tour in Washington this week and is expected to leave his post by August.
In his case, the name of former Slovenian president Borut Pahor, who is currently working on a draft outline for the continuation of the Kosovo-Serbia dialogue, has been suggested as a possible successor.
At the same time, the new EU chief diplomat, who will replace current president Josep Borrell, who heads the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue, is not expected to take office until the end of this year. According to recent polls and political reshuffles among political groups, the candidate may come from the liberals rather than the socialists this time.
Until then, EU diplomats expect dialogue to be largely dormant, with high-level meetings unlikely to happen.
Some hope that the EU’s new institutional cycle will be able to break the deadlock by bringing back an incentive that worked more than a decade ago: a real prospect of future EU integration and the financial advantages that come with the process. .
“While the new mediators have a chance to improve the dynamic, there are more structural problems, such as the lack of a credible EU membership perspective,” Florian Bieber, professor at the University of Graz, told Euractiv.
He added, “They need a new approach with sustainable and transparent commitments and a stronger EU.”
“If the next European Commission, as expected, is an enlargement-focused commission, there is a possibility that those political processes will be looked at more closely,” said an EU official.
“We could see more incentives – and more pressure – applied to all parties,” they added.
But there are even bigger obstacles, such as the low approval of the Serbian public for EU membership, the improbable progress of Kosovo in its bid for EU membership, especially with Hungary taking over the next presidency of the Council of the EU and the fact that still, the five countries EU members do not recognize its independence.
