Tirana: A country that filed its membership application more than a decade ago has, almost quietly, crossed into the part of the journey where the end becomes thinkable. On 26 May the eighth intergovernmental conference between Albania and the European Union opened the concluding phase of accession talks, the stage at which negotiators stop opening files and start closing them. It is a procedural milestone with an emotional charge, because for Albanians who remember the bunkers and the blackouts of the early nineties, the prospect of joining the club from the inside has never felt this close.
The path to the conference ran through a less glamorous document. Five days earlier the Council working group on enlargement signed off on an interim benchmark assessment, the report that judges whether a candidate has done enough on the so-called fundamentals to deserve the next gear. Albania passed. With that box ticked, ministers were able to set the closing benchmarks for the first cluster, the one covering the judiciary, the fight against corruption and organised crime, the functioning of democratic institutions and the reform of public administration. These are the chapters that decide whether a state can be trusted with the shared rules of the single market, and they are deliberately the hardest to close.
Marta Kos, the commissioner who has made enlargement her defining file, has been careful not to oversell the moment while still letting the ambition show. She has suggested that Albania could wrap up its negotiations as early as next year, which would put it on track to enter the Union shortly after Montenegro, the front runner whose own treaty drafting has already begun. Two small Balkan states arriving within a year or two of each other would mark the first real widening of the Union since Croatia, and a vindication of the argument that the bloc cannot preach to its neighbourhood while keeping the door wedged shut.
None of this guarantees a smooth descent. Closing benchmarks are written precisely so that a government cannot game them with last-minute laws that never touch real life, and the cluster on rule of law tends to expose the gap between statutes and habits. Tirana will need to show prosecutions that reach the powerful, courts that decide without a phone call, and an administration that survives a change of government. Domestic politics can stall too, and any of the twenty-seven capitals retains the power to slow a chapter for reasons that have little to do with Albania itself.
Yet the direction is unmistakable. For years the Western Balkans heard warm words about a European future paired with a process that never seemed to move, and the credibility of the whole enterprise suffered for it. A candidate now standing in the final corridor, with a timeline that officials are willing to say out loud, changes the conversation for the entire region. It tells Skopje, Podgorica, Pristina and the others that the corridor has an exit after all, and that the reward for the dull, grinding work of reform is real. The remaining distance is short on a map and long in practice, but Albania is, for the first time, walking it as a country expected to finish.
