Hungary champions EU enlargement, seeks progress for Western Balkans

Hungary’s EU presidency seeks to take substantive steps towards helping Western Balkan countries narrow the gap with the EU, a European affairs ministry official said in Strasbourg on Wednesday.

Pál Zsigmond Barna, the ministry’s parliamentary state secretary, told MTI that Serbia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Albania and Bosnia-Herzegovina, had invited him and a representative of Turkiye to a meeting focusing on EU enlargement during the autumn session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).

He said Hungary regards the integration of the Western Balkans as a cornerstone of stability of both the region and the bloc as a whole in terms of national strategic, security, military and migration interests. EU enlargement, he added, should be merit-based rather than political.

Meanwhile, he said cooperation with Turkiye, a key security and economic partner of the EU, “must continue in all areas”, especially given its key role in the fight against migration.

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