TIRANA, October 19/ATA/- France faced a backlash after blocking the start of formal EU talks with North Macedonia and Albania to join the bloc, deepening a dispute over enlargement that has become a defining test of the EU’s post-Brexit strategic ambitions.
The US intervened on Friday to urge that both countries be allowed to start the accession process, after French president Emmanuel Macron stood alone in opposing both their membership bids during talks with fellow EU leaders at a Brussels summit.
“The time to open accession negotiations with Albania and North Macedonia is now,” Morgan Ortagus, US state department spokesperson, said on Twitter on Friday.
“The United States will welcome an affirmative . . . decision, recognising both countries’ hard fought gains on necessary reforms.”
European critics of Paris’s stance say it is a betrayal of promises made to the two western Balkan states and risks pushing them and other countries in their region into the orbit of rival powers such as Russia and China.
Giuseppe Conte, Italy’s prime minister, told reporters that failure to open EU enlargement to both countries would “be remembered as a historic error”.
Donald Tusk, European Council president, also said it was a “mistake” not to begin the accession talks. The postponement has plunged the government of North Macedonia into crisis.
The main opposition party has called for the pro-EU government of prime minister Zoran Zaev to resign.
“For us in the Balkans, yesterday Emmanuel Macron sounded like the European Trump.” Nikola Dimitrov, foreign minister of North Macedonia, said in a tweet: “The least that the EU owes the region is to be straightforward with us. If there is no more consensus on the European future of the western Balkans . . . the citizens deserve to know.”
While President Donald Trump’s administration has had a difficult and even hostile relationship with the EU in some areas, its view on enlargement is shared by a large majority of bloc members.
On North Macedonia, France is largely isolated among EU members. On Albania, its scepticism is shared by the Netherlands and Denmark.
Alexis Tsipras, the former Greek prime minister who negotiated the end of the name dispute with Skopje, said in a tweet that rejecting the start of accession talks with North Macedonia was “a message of weakness and defeat for the European project”.
Pro-accession EU diplomats say the bloc’s credibility is at stake if it refuses to open its doors to states that have made requested reforms. “It sends a very bad signal to other countries,” said one.
France says neither North Macedonia nor Albania have completed the reforms required to begin accession talks.
French leaders have long emphasised the need to reinforce cohesion in the existing EU and deepen its internal reforms rather than enlarge it to embrace new members, arguing that brain drains and mass emigration of young people from Bulgaria, Romania and Croatia to the rest of the EU demonstrate a problem of hasty enlargement.
“I do not think the only relationship we should have with our neighbourhood should be a relationship of expansion, of enlargement,” Mr Macron said at the end of the meeting. “It does not work very well with 28, it will not work very well with 27 and I am not sure it will work much better after enlargement.”
Paris wants Albania to improve its co-operation on restricting illegal migration into the EU. Many asylum seekers in France are Albanians deemed to be fleeing for economic reasons rather than to escape persecution — but Paris is wary about being portrayed as targeting Albania, which is largely Muslim, while favouring North Macedonia, which is largely Christian.//a.i/
