Podgorica: Montenegro expects the first draft of its accession treaty before the end of September, a deadline the European Commission set for itself while fifteen negotiating chapters remain open and the country absorbs mounting pressure from its neighbours.
The Council created an ad hoc working group in May, after ambassadors signed off on the idea on 22 April, and that group is now drafting the text and the legal acts that travel with it. Those documents will fix transitional periods, institutional arrangements, financial obligations and safeguard clauses, the practical terms on which Montenegro would become the twenty-eighth member state.
Progress on the chapters explains the confidence. In July the accession conference provisionally closed competition policy and the customs union, lifting the total to eighteen of thirty-three. Negotiators expect another four or five to close at the next intergovernmental conference, and Podgorica insists the rest sit at ninety percent or better.
The arithmetic still argues for caution. Closing fifteen chapters in under four months would be the fastest sprint any candidate has managed, and the hardest files are the ones left standing. Chapters 23 and 24, covering the judiciary, fundamental rights and the whole justice and home affairs package, measure institutional behaviour rather than legal text. Member states have refused to close them on promises before.
Politics has also intruded from outside. Brussels sources told the Montenegrin daily Pobjeda that ambassadors from five large member states held urgent consultations in August over hybrid pressure on Montenegro, much of it traced to Serbia, and recommended that the Commission shield the accession process. Von der Leyen’s office, working with the Irish Council presidency, is expected to steer the next steps directly.
Bilateral friction with Croatia sits on the same list. The Commission wants both capitals to intensify talks and reach a compromise, because unresolved bilateral disputes have derailed accession timetables in the Western Balkans repeatedly, and any single member state can stall ratification at the end.
That end point deserves more attention than it usually gets. A finished accession treaty is not membership. Every national parliament and the European Parliament must ratify, a process that historically runs eighteen months to two years. Montenegro’s government talks about joining in 2028 and has begun writing budget assumptions around that date, which only works if ratification starts early in 2027.
Critics of the accelerated plan make a coherent case. Speeding a candidate through the final chapters to bank a geopolitical win risks importing unresolved rule of law problems, the exact mistake the Union spent the last decade regretting. The Commission’s 2026 rule of law assessment now covers Montenegro alongside member states, which gives sceptical capitals a documented basis to push back.
Supporters answer that delay carries its own price. Montenegro has run the most consistent reform record in the region, and if the most advanced candidate cannot finish, enlargement stops meaning anything to Tirana, Skopje or Kyiv. Momentum, on this reading, is a security policy rather than a favour.
September will show which argument the member states believe. A circulated treaty draft would mark the first time since Croatia that the Union has put accession terms on paper, and the reaction in national capitals will say more about the 2028 target than any progress report.
