The Commission is expected to formally back Albania’s 2027 accession timeline in a new action plan, which is also expected to include a list of key deliverables that Tirana will need to prioritise in order to complete the process by the end of next year.
The European Commission is working towards wrapping up Albania’s accession process by December 2027 — a timeline that Tirana has long cited 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 to confirm Albania’s stated goal of closing all negotiating chapters by the end of next year and to set out priority deliverables to address the remaining accession gaps.
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 the ambition, the EU executive generally does not set accession deadlines, as enlargement is intended to be 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 years,” Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos said in July.
That is set to change soon. 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.
“We will soon propose roadmaps for the candidates that have made the most progress,” von der Leyen said, mentioning Ukraine, Moldova and the Western Balkans as countries whose future lies in the EU.
The roadmaps are expected to set out an indicative timeline to give candidate countries a clearer sense of direction, echoing the 2002 enlargement strategy that paved the way for the “Big Bang” accession of 10 new members.
The roadmaps will be included in the Commission’s enlargement package, its annual review of the accession process, expected at the end of October, which also includes country-specific assessments and recommendations on further steps.
In this context, the Commission is drafting a closing benchmark assessment report to evaluate whether a candidate country has met the established benchmarks required to be considered as having fulfilled accession requirements, particularly in the areas of justice and the rule of law, the so-called “fundamentals”.
In Albania’s case, the plan is to include a list of key deliverables setting out the reforms and measures needed to close the remaining benchmark gaps.
This was already the case for Montenegro, where the Commission used the closing benchmark process to identify the reforms and concrete results that needed to be delivered.
The list of deliverables is intended to clearly signal to candidate countries where the priorities lie, pushing them to complete the remaining steps.
“Essentially, the Commission saw that this approach worked well with Montenegro and they want to replicate it,” an EU official told Euronews, requesting anonymity due to the sensitivity of the discussions.
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