North Macedonia has been waiting to join the European Union for more than two decades, having applied for membership in 2004 and received candidate status in 2005.
After years of delays, the EU finally opened accession negotiations in 2020. The first EU-Skopje intergovernmental conference followed in July 2022, but the process has yet to move forward.
The main obstacle remains a veto by its neighbour, Bulgaria. Amendments to North Macedonia’s constitution, designed to include Bulgarians among the country’s constitutive peoples in the preamble, were agreed as part of a 2022 EU-sponsored compromise to lift the veto. But their adoption – which is still a condition for moving forward – has yet to occur.
The European Commission’s latest progress report, published last week, records this impasse. While North Macedonia has advanced in preparing the benchmarks for opening the first negotiating “cluster”, known as “the Fundamentals”, it has made no progress on adopting the required constitutional changes.
Please login to your account below if you are already a Premium Subscriber.
Our Premium Service gives you full access to all content published on BalkanInsight.com, including analyses, investigations, comments, interviews and more. Choose your subscription today and get unparalleled in-depth coverage of the Southern and Eastern Europe.
If you have trouble logging in or any other questions regarding you account, please contact us