Hungarian government continues to promote soonest possible EU enlargement
Hungary continues to promote European Union (EU) enlargement as soon as possible because the community has been in great need of new impetus and dynamism, which the accession of Western Balkans countries could provide, the foreign minister said in Berlin on Tuesday.
Péter Szijjártó told a Berlin Process foreign ministers’ meeting that among “the current turbulent changes,” the EU needs freshness and new energy to stop its decrease in competitiveness and overcome the challenges.
“We believe the Western Balkans is the place from where this new inspiration and new impetus could come,” he said. “This is why we put enlargement at the top when we compiled the programme of Hungary’s EU presidency,” he added. He condemned that candidate countries from the region had been waiting for eleven years and five months on average for accession and their request for candidacy had been submitted more than fifteen years ago.
“It is obvious that if we do not make progress in this process, it will hurt the credibility of the EU’s enlargement policy,”
he said. Szijjártó added that his EU counterparts would frequently talk about the importance of a merit-based process but the failure to make progress would actually show that this principle was being neglected. “It is very obvious that despite the good performance of the candidates, the enlargement process is not moving ahead,” he said.
He said it was during Hungary’s previous EU presidency that the EU was last time enlarged, when Croatia’s accession process was successfully finalised.
“In the next three months of Hungary’s presidency, the EU will hold inter-governmental conferences with the five candidate countries from the Western Balkans, at least this is our definite goal,” he said.
The foreign minister said that the soonest inter-governmental conference can be held with Albania in mid-October, where the first group of chapters can be opened for talks. Szijjártó added Serbia was a key state for the region and it was therefore unavoidable and extremely important to make progress in its integration process. “An indispensable element of this is to hold an intergovernmental conference also with Serbia,” he said, adding that “we believe that the third group of chapters needs to be opened with Serbia”.
Commenting on Montenegro, he said chapters could even be closed in the case of that country, not only opened. “Montenegro has been performing well, at least four chapters could be closed,” he added.
Szijjártó said consultations with Bosnia and Herzegovina were on going and the country was also performing well.
He expressed regret that certain EU members were blocking the accession process for North Macedonia. “North Macedonia deserves progress, and therefore it is important to hold a political inter-governmental conference in the next three months.”
As we wrote before, PM Orbán said that North Macedonia should already be an EU member state.
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The EU would never allow another Russian proxy veto in its’ organization with Serbia. Hungary is too much already. Before any further enlargement takes place the EU will need to end the veto power of members replacing it with a form of super majority requirement for votes.
Western Balkan countries certainly feel that they are ready to become takers of EU funds, just like Hungary is. But EU cannot handle more takers, it needs contributors. Also, like Larry said, EU need to change its own legislation to no let one or two religious authoritarian ruled member states veto important decisions with their “common sense” (and zero knowledge) based viewpoints.
And everybody knows about the security risks there are with having open borders into EU from Western Balkan countries. There is plenty of development in legislation to do in these countries before they could be EU members. Anyone can read about these issues from European Comission website.