Chișinău: Moldovan officials spent the summer preparing for a negotiation that has not started. Their files are ready. The screening reports that would let clusters two and three open sit with the Council, and one delegation has now declined twice to wave them through.
Ambassadors on the Council’s enlargement working party tried on 22 July and failed. Hungary refused to endorse the screening results for the internal market cluster and the competitiveness cluster, for Ukraine and for Moldova alike. Diplomats have pencilled in 1 September for a third attempt. Nobody in the room expects the arithmetic to change on its own.
The refusal carries an awkward history. Budapest dropped its blanket objection to Ukraine’s accession in June, after the change of government in Hungary, and Kyiv opened its first cluster the following month. Four accession conferences ran on 14 July. The process looked unstuck. It then stuck again at a more technical, and more revealing, point.
Opening a cluster requires unanimity. So does closing one. So does almost every intermediate step between a candidate’s application and its treaty. That design made sense when enlargement moved slowly and involved small numbers of applicants. It sits badly with nine candidates, two of them at war or next to it, and a target date that several capitals now speak about out loud.
Parliament has argued the obvious fix. Members want the European Council to shift the intermediate steps of accession talks to qualified majority voting, leaving unanimity only for the decisions that genuinely alter the Union’s membership. The final accession treaty would still need every parliament. Opening a chapter on public procurement would not.
Member states have not embraced the idea, and the reason is not sentiment. Unanimity at each stage gives every capital repeated leverage over a candidate for a decade or more. Bilateral disputes over minorities, borders, church property and history all find their moment. Governments that hold such disputes are unlikely to vote away the instrument that keeps them live.
Moldova has become the accidental casualty. Chișinău tracks Kyiv’s progress because the two were coupled early, and the coupling has held through every stage since. When Ukraine stalls, Moldova stalls, whatever the state of Moldovan legislation on competition policy or customs. Officials there have started asking, carefully, whether decoupling would serve them better.
Montenegro shows what movement looks like when nobody objects. It closed competition and customs on 14 July, bringing its provisionally closed chapters to eighteen, past the halfway mark, with 2028 openly discussed as a target. Albania closed its first three chapters the same day and talks about concluding negotiations in 2027. The Council’s own account of that day reads as a progress report rather than a standoff.
Two things follow. The first is that enlargement now runs at two speeds set by different mechanisms. Montenegro and Albania advance on merit and technical readiness. Ukraine and Moldova advance when a single capital decides to let them. The second is that the September attempt matters less as a decision than as a signal about whether the reformist Hungarian government will use the veto its predecessor built.
There is a quieter cost. Candidates align their legislative calendars to the expectation of opening a cluster. Ministries hire, laws get drafted, transitional periods get negotiated in advance. A block that arrives twice and may arrive a third time turns that work into inventory. Reform momentum in candidate countries has historically depended on visible reward, and the reward here has become conditional on something no candidate can influence.
The Commission’s enlargement package this autumn will describe progress in Ukraine and Moldova in some detail. It will not be able to say that the corresponding clusters opened, unless 1 September goes differently from July.
