Strasbourg – This year, there are very few takeaways on EU enlargement from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen‘s sixth State of the Union address, especially compared with the 2025 edition.
In a Europe facing existential challenges to its future, and with the Commission President even reaching out to Canada with an offer of a vaguely defined status as an EU associate member, the traditional enlargement partners have been largely neglected – apart from Ukraine, but mostly because of the security implications for Europe as a whole.
In terms of the EU enlargement process itself, von der Leyen’s attention is limited to a final passage of the speech delivered to the European Parliament plenary on 16 September, at the beginning of the third year of her second term at the helm of the Commission.
“We only need to look beyond our borders to understand how alive this European idea still is,” she said after more than an hour of speech. “We need only look towards Ukraine and Moldova. Towards the Western Balkans. We need only look towards all those countries close to our Union.”
The only real highlight is the announcement that the Commission will “soon propose roadmaps for the most advanced candidates.” Namely, Montenegro and Albania, but potentially also Moldova, which still finds itself stuck in a ‘package approach’ with Ukraine, slowing down Chișinău’s prospects of opening all six clusters of negotiating chapters despite having met all the criteria (so far, only two clusters have been opened).
“This process will remain merit-based,” von der Leyen repeated a well-known adage, accompanied by a “respect for our values is non-negotiable” that served to launch a tirade which, on closer inspection, appears to be an end in itself.
The European Commission President said she was “horrified” by the images of Bosnian Serb war criminal Ratko Mladić’s funeral in Belgrade last week. The ‘Butcher of Bosnia’ was sentenced to life imprisonment for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s. “The glorification of war criminals simply has no place in the European Union,” she continued. However, there were no words on potential consequences for Serbia’s EU accession path, nor any indication that she might cancel her trip to Belgrade ahead of the 25 October elections.
What was also clearly missing was any reference to the upcoming long-awaited proposal for pre-enlargement policy reviews, which should prepare the Union for welcoming new members. Instead, a more general statement – “our Union was born as a project of peace, so that our tragic past could give way to a shared future for Europeans” – was preferred, with the most predictable dramatic ending: “Decades later, millions of people still see in Europe a promise — sometimes as far away as Canada.”
Reacting to von der Leyen’s speech, Berta López Domènech, Policy Analyst at the European Policy Centre (EPC), notes that “the closer some candidate countries are to meeting EU membership criteria, the further away accession seems to be.” In particular, talking about roadmaps without recognising the possibility of Montenegro concluding the accession negotiations by the end of this year – a timeline that the Commission itself had endorsed – “makes enlargement inevitably come across as a very distant goal.”
Beyond the “grandiloquent discourse” about the imperative of enlargement, such neglect of EU enlargement “shows there is still hesitation about opening the doors to new members,” López Domènech underlines. As Viktor Orbán‘s defeat in the 2026 Hungarian elections removed “a very convenient scapegoat” to justify the EU’s inability to deliver on this policy area, the question now is “whether the EU is prepared to take political ownership” of its enlargement policy. If not, it will be inevitable that the EU’s credibility gap in candidate countries will “only deepen.”
