The European Commission is working toward concluding Albania’s EU accession negotiations by December 2027, a timeline that Tirana has promoted for some time and which is now expected to receive formal recognition in the EU’s upcoming enlargement roadmaps, EU officials told Euronews.
The Commission is preparing an action plan that would confirm Albania’s stated objective of closing all negotiating chapters by the end of next year and identify priority outcomes needed to address the remaining gaps in the accession process.
Albania has set the end of 2027 as its target for completing accession negotiations, a timeline that Prime Minister Edi Rama and other senior officials have repeatedly described as a plan agreed with the European Commission.
However, while Commission officials have supported Albania’s ambition, the EU executive has traditionally avoided setting fixed accession deadlines, as enlargement is intended to remain a merit-based process.
“As you know, enlargement does not work with dates. But the closer the country gets to the end of the technical part of accession, the more we can say about it, or the more we can use the years,” Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos said in July.
That approach could soon change. 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.
“Soon, we will propose roadmaps for the candidates that have made the most progress,” von der Leyen said, naming Ukraine, Moldova and the Western Balkans among those whose future lies in the European Union.
The roadmaps are expected to establish an indicative timeline, giving candidate countries a clearer sense of direction. The approach echoes the EU’s 2002 enlargement strategy, which paved the way for the “Big Bang” accession of 10 new member states.
The roadmaps will form part of the Commission’s enlargement package, its annual assessment of the accession process, expected at the end of October. The package will also include country-specific assessments and recommendations on the next steps.
Against this backdrop, the Commission is preparing a concluding standards assessment to determine whether a candidate country has met the benchmarks required to be considered compliant with accession requirements, particularly in the areas of justice and the rule of law, known as the “fundamentals.”
For Albania, the plan is to include a list of key outcomes outlining the reforms and measures needed to close the remaining gaps in meeting the benchmarks.
A similar approach was already used for Montenegro, where the Commission relied on a process of final benchmarks to identify specific reforms and concrete outcomes that needed to be delivered.
The list of outcomes is intended to give candidate countries a clear signal of where their priorities lie and encourage them to complete the remaining steps.
“Essentially, the Commission saw that this approach worked well with Montenegro and they want to repeat it,” an EU official told Euronews, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the discussions.
