Brussels confronting a question that has become as important as the readiness of candidate countries: whether the EU itself is prepared to absorb them.

The European Union’s push to bring in new members is entering a critical phase this autumn, with Brussels confronting a question that has become as important as the readiness of candidate countries: whether the EU itself is prepared to absorb them.

EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos has called the coming months an “autumn of enlargement”, as the bloc prepares to consider the next steps for countries including Montenegro, Albania, Ukraine and Moldova, the four candidate countries now considered the closest to accession.

But turning renewed political momentum into actual accessions will require movement on several fronts. The EU will need to adjust its institutions, budgets and decision-making procedures; member states will have to stop bilateral disputes and political disagreements from blocking negotiations; and candidate countries will still have to deliver often difficult reforms in areas including the rule of law, judicial independence and public administration.

The European Council is due to hold a strategic discussion on enlargement at its October 15-16 meeting in Brussels. The Commission is also preparing a pre-enlargement review covering how the bloc could function with more than 30 members, alongside proposed roadmaps for the most advanced candidates. After repeated delays, this is now expected on October 6.

In a significant change from previous enlargement rounds, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, expansion of the bloc moved from largely a long-term institutional project to a crucial part of European security policy. Ukraine and Moldova were granted EU candidate status that year, while the renewed geopolitical focus also gave fresh impetus to the stalled Western Balkan accession process.

Yet the political case for enlargement does not remove the practical problems. “The main argument we are making is that in the two previous enlargement rounds, we saw the institutional update before the enlargement,” said Ditte Maria Brasso Sørensen of Think Tank Europa, whose recent analysis examines how EU voting rules would work after enlargement. “There is some cleaning up to be done internally in the EU to make it enlargement ready.”

Reforming the house before adding new rooms

The EU has already acknowledged that its own preparations must proceed alongside the accession process. EU leaders agreed in 2024 that internal reform should cover values, policies, the budget and governance, while stressing that both the Union and future members need to be ready when accession takes place.

Kos has said some of the necessary changes should be possible without reopening the EU treaties, an approach designed to avoid a potentially lengthy process of ratification in 27 member states. “We should use this to make decision-making leaner and more flexible,” Kos said in a speech at the Conference of Ambassadors on August 26. “This could also mean reducing the number of areas where a single member state can block everyone else. It could also mean making our institutions smaller.”

The most politically sensitive question is qualified majority voting (QMV). Under the current system, most Council decisions subject to QMV require the support of at least 55% of member states representing at least 65% of the EU population. Adding states with very different populations would alter the arithmetic behind both majorities and blocking minorities.

Think Tank Europa’s analysis models the impact of adding Montenegro, Moldova, Ukraine and the Western Balkan countries. It concludes that Montenegro’s relatively small population would have little effect on the population threshold, while Ukraine and Moldova would have a much more substantial impact. The study also finds that a Polish-Ukrainian combination could become an important component of blocking minorities.

The researchers stress that such modelling does not predict how future member states would actually vote, but it does illustrate why enlargement is not simply an exercise in adding countries to the existing institutional structure.

“The main argument is that we saw the institutional update before the enlargement,” Brasso Sørensen said. “We are expecting the pre-enlargement review from the Commission. I expect the general principle embedded in the Lisbon Treaty where you have a double majority system to stay, but it’s likely we will see some reconfiguration of the thresholds.”

That leaves EU governments with a difficult political choice. Changing the voting system before enlargement could make a larger Union easier to govern, but it would also change the distribution of power among existing member states. France and Germany, whose relative voting weight would fall as new members enter, have an obvious interest in the institutional debate.

At the same time, an EU that grows substantially without adjusting its decision-making machinery risks making unanimity-based areas even harder to manage.

“Different ways of front-loading the benefits of membership and back-loading the formal decisions and integration into decision-making procedures are being very closely considered,” Brasso Sørensen said.

“But even under a gradual integration scenario, the EU will at some point need to do the housecleaning at home … We can do a political compromise on gradual accession, but there is still a procedural issue that needs to be fixed.”

Gradual integration could bridge the gap

That has encouraged Brussels to look beyond the traditional model in which a country remains outside the Union until all negotiations are completed and then becomes a full member. Kos has argued that the EU needs to offer candidates more tangible benefits during the accession process, including deeper participation in parts of the single market and other EU programmes.

“We must therefore move away from an ‘all or nothing’ logic in enlargement,” she said in August. “We need a more structured approach to bridge the time we no longer have. We need to look for more ambitious ways of gradual integration.”

The idea is particularly relevant for countries whose accession negotiations are unlikely to move as quickly as those of the current frontrunners. A recent paper published by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) argued that Montenegro and Albania should be supported as they move towards membership, but warned against allowing their progress to obscure the difficulties faced elsewhere in the Western Balkans.

“A more ambitious and flexible framework for gradual integration, aiming to include countries in parts of the internal market, would encourage reforms and allow the EU to develop a more intelligent and honest approach to conditionality,” wrote Milica Delević of the ECFR.

The approach could therefore address two problems simultaneously: providing political and economic incentives to candidates while avoiding a situation in which countries are left waiting indefinitely for full membership. However, gradual integration is not a substitute for institutional reform.

Ireland pushes the frontrunners

Ireland, which holds the rotating Council presidency in the second half of 2026, has made enlargement a central priority and is seeking to use its role to move the existing accession process forward.

“EU Enlargement is a key priority of Ireland’s EU Presidency,” a spokesperson for the Irish Council presidency told IntelliNews. “As EU Presidency, Ireland aims to advance the candidacies of all candidate and potential candidate countries, provided that necessary reforms are implemented and necessary conditions allow.”

Ireland has singled out Montenegro, Ukraine, Moldova and Albania as the four frontrunners. The presidency says it secured a record number of accession conferences in a single day in July, while Montenegro has now closed more than half of its negotiating chapters and Albania entered the next phase of its process with the closure of its first three chapters. Ireland also facilitated the opening of Cluster 6 with both Ukraine and Moldova.

“An important signal to all candidate countries – and their citizens – that the EU is serious about enlargement,” the Irish presidency said of the establishment of an ad hoc working party to draft Montenegro’s accession treaty.

The presidency is also trying to address the other half of the equation. “Recognising that our union also needs to continue preparations for new members joining our union, our Presidency also held a discussion at the informal GAC with EU member states on preparing future accession treaties,” it said.

That dual-track approach is likely to become increasingly important as the frontrunners move closer to the end of their negotiations. “Once candidates have implemented the necessary reforms and met the relevant EU acquis, Ireland’s Presidency will continue to push for their formal progress along the existing agreed enlargement methodology,” the presidency said.

Political blockages remain

However, the accession process does not only depend on what candidate governments do. Because enlargement decisions ultimately require the agreement of member states, individual capitals retain considerable leverage over negotiations. That can allow bilateral disputes to become obstacles to accession even where a candidate has made technical progress.

North Macedonia has been a candidate since 2005 but has still not closed a negotiating chapter, with its accession path stalled by disputes with its neighbours, first Greece and now Bulgaria.

Montenegro, despite having opened all 33 negotiating chapters and provisionally closed 16, has also encountered obstacles linked to bilateral issues. Croatia has withheld support for closing parts of Montenegro’s negotiations, with disputes linked to unresolved issues from the wars of the 1990s.

For Ukraine, Hungary remains an obstacle. According to EU sources cited by European Pravda, as this autumn’s push for enlargement approaches, Budapest has not approved screening results for Cluster 2, covering the internal market, and Cluster 3, covering competitiveness and inclusive growth, preventing the opening of those areas of negotiations.

Such blockages expose a structural tension in the enlargement process. The EU expects candidates to implement reforms and settle disputes with neighbours, but member states can themselves determine whether technically prepared candidates are allowed to advance. That is particularly significant as Brussels tries to accelerate the process for geopolitical reasons. The EU’s challenge is consequently to maintain pressure for reforms without allowing the process to become permanently hostage to bilateral disputes.

Candidate countries still have to deliver

None of this removes the traditional requirements placed on candidate countries. The EU’s enlargement process remains formally merit-based. Governments seeking membership must adopt and implement the acquis, strengthen institutions and demonstrate that democratic standards and the rule of law are durable rather than temporary measures adopted simply to pass accession benchmarks.

The Commission’s own internal reform work makes clear that rule-of-law requirements apply both before and after accession. EU discussions have included stronger conditionality mechanisms, greater transparency in rule-of-law procedures and closer involvement of candidate countries in the annual rule-of-law dialogue.

This creates another dilemma. The EU wants guarantees that new members will not undermine democratic standards after joining, but imposing special restrictions on their rights after accession could challenge the principle that members are equal.

Kos has described stronger safeguards as necessary to prevent what she called “Trojan horses” entering the Union, referring to the risk of future democratic backsliding. She has argued that lessons from the experience of Hungary under former prime minister Viktor Orban show the need for stronger mechanisms. At an event on September 8, she explicitly singled out Western Balkan supporters of the US MAGA movement as a source of pressure.

Critical months ahead

The coming months will show whether Brussels can reconcile those competing demands. The Commission’s pre-enlargement review and proposed country roadmaps are expected to give shape to the debate, while the October European Council will provide the first major political test of whether member states can agree on the changes needed to prepare for a larger Union.

The process will then depend on candidates continuing to implement reforms, member states allowing technically justified negotiations to proceed, and the EU itself resolving questions over voting, budgets, institutional capacity and safeguards.

“Ireland’s Presidency will seek to seize upon the current momentum surrounding Enlargement policy,” it said. “Once candidates have implemented the necessary reforms and met the relevant EU acquis, Ireland’s Presidency will continue to push for their formal progress along the existing agreed enlargement methodology.”

The EU is effectively preparing for two accession negotiations at once: one with countries seeking to join, and another among existing members over what kind of Union they are prepared to become. That may prove to be the central question of the autumn of enlargement: not simply whether candidate countries can meet the EU’s conditions, but whether the EU can change enough itself to make the enlargement it now wants politically and institutionally workable.

 

This article is part of a series on EU enlargement. Read other articles in the series here: 

Is there new hope for unblocking North Macedonia’s EU path?

A cancelled concert in Gori shows how far EU-Georgia relations have fallen

EU considers a new path towards membership for the Western Balkans

What is holding back Serbia’s EU accession?

New member states could help fill labour gaps from Poland to Croatia

Montenegro’s EU finish line is in sight, but the final stretch could be the hardest