TIRANA, Oct. 10 – A week before the European Council meeting to decide the fate of negotiations with Albania and Northern Macedonia, France has announced it wants the opening of negotiations for both countries to be postponed by 2020.
Further on, the EU founding country presented its concrete proposal for opening accession negotiations with Albania and Macedonia.
This proposal is based on two axes. First, it relates to meeting key criteria related to respect for the rule of law, the fight against corruption and organized crime, and second, to reforming the European Union enlargement process.
France considers that before the accession negotiations with Albania and Northern Macedonia are opened, the relevant conditions must be met.
Firstly, Albania must implement the justice reform and electoral reform, while Northern Macedonia must make progress on the special prosecution case, reports ABC news correspondent Erisa Zyka.
France thus supports Germany’s stance on conditionality for Albania, but is more nuanced and critical about the problems of corruption and organized crime in Albania, the concrete progress made in reforms in Albania and northern Macedonia and considers that there is a point of view more realistic on the political situation in both countries.
For France, the opening of accession negotiations is postponed to 2020 for both countries once the above conditions are met.
“They are not there yet. We are asking them to make additional efforts,” a French official said. “Negotiation cannot be opened in October 2019, we will need to reassess the situation somewhere in 2020.”
In addition, France wants to reverse the enlargement process, which so far has not yielded the expected results.
The French government has a more nuanced and less optimistic assessment than the European Commission on enlargement.
The French government’s stance implies that the European Commission’s assessment is too mechanical, technocratic, and dividing the negotiating framework into 35 chapters has not yielded the expected results.
According to France, the enlargement process for the new European Commission should be more gradual, more controlled and include the expertise of the member states, in order for the progress to be achieved.
In this context, ambassadors representing European Union governments failed Wednesday to agree on whether the bloc should open accession negotiations with Albania and North Macedonia, two people familiar with the meeting said.
The envoys will debate the matter again on Friday, before a ministerial meeting next week in Luxembourg, where a decision is due to be taken.
France went as far as questioning the entire “methodology” of the enlargement process, demanding a postponement of the decision until the bloc revises the process, the officials said.
