Tirana: Albanian negotiators returned from the ninth accession conference in Brussels on 14 July with something no Albanian government had ever brought home, and the Albania accession file now enters the phase where progress gets harder rather than easier. Ministers provisionally closed three chapters that day, leaving thirty of the thirty-three still open with barely eighteen months on the government’s own clock.
The three chapters cover science and research, education and culture, and external relations. Diplomats picked them deliberately. Each aligns closely with Union rules already, each carries limited fiscal weight, and each let both sides demonstrate that the machinery works. The Council confirmed the closures the same afternoon.
What unlocked them mattered more than the chapters themselves. In May, member states accepted that Tirana had met the interim benchmarks on cluster one, the fundamentals block covering judicial independence, the fight against corruption, public administration and the functioning of democratic institutions. That acceptance switched the file from opening mode to closing mode. Under the revised methodology, nothing closes until the fundamentals move, and the fundamentals close last.
Prime Minister Edi Rama has pinned his government to 2027 for the end of negotiations and 2030 for membership. Several capitals privately treat the first date as ambitious and the second as a slogan. The arithmetic explains the scepticism. Thirty chapters remain, and the ones still untouched include agriculture, environment, judiciary and fundamental rights, and competition policy, each of which has historically absorbed years in every previous enlargement round.
Albania’s advantage is sequencing. Because the country opened all thirty-three chapters in a single burst between 2024 and 2025, screening reports and negotiating positions already exist across the board. Officials in the enlargement directorate argue that this front-loading lets closing benchmarks arrive in clusters rather than one file at a time. The Commission’s country page tracks each cluster as it moves.
The bottleneck sits elsewhere. Closing a chapter requires unanimity among twenty-seven governments, and enlargement has become a proxy for arguments about budgets, farm payments and voting weights after accession. France and the Netherlands want the internal reform question answered before any new member arrives. Others, watching the Western Balkans drift toward other partners, treat delay as its own strategic cost.
Montenegro sits further along the same track, having closed roughly half its chapters, and Podgorica’s pace now functions as a benchmark Tirana measures itself against. That comparison cuts both ways. It gives Albanian negotiators a template, and it gives sceptical capitals a reason to insist that Albania match every step rather than borrow momentum.
Autumn will settle the tone. The Commission publishes its annual enlargement package in the coming weeks, and its verdict on Albania’s judicial vetting, media freedom and organised crime prosecutions will shape which chapters open for closure next. Tirana wants five more shut by spring. Brussels has not said yes, and has not said no.
