Podgorica: The government here set itself a target that looked ambitious in 2024 and looks arithmetically brutal now. Montenegro wants to close all thirty-three negotiating chapters by the end of 2026. Eighteen are provisionally closed. The calendar holds roughly four months.
The pace this year has been real. The twenty-sixth accession conference closed the trans-European networks chapter in March. The twenty-seventh closed free movement of workers and consumer and health protection in June. The twenty-eighth, in mid-July, closed competition policy and the customs union, pushing the country past the halfway mark. Five chapters in five months represents the fastest run any candidate has managed since Croatia.
Clearing fifteen more in a third of the time is a different proposition. The chapters that remain include the ones that traditionally sit longest, and closing a chapter requires the country to satisfy benchmarks, the Commission to confirm it, and all twenty-seven member states to agree in the Council. Any single capital can hold a file for domestic reasons entirely unrelated to Montenegrin performance.
The frontrunner status is nonetheless earned. Montenegro opened every chapter years ago while other candidates were still waiting for clusters, and the country’s small administration has proved better at absorbing the acquis than its size suggests. Independent trackers put the Montenegro accession file well ahead of Serbia, Albania, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Kosovo on every conventional measure.
Two risks stand out. The first is rule of law. Chapters twenty-three and twenty-four govern judiciary, fundamental rights, justice and security, and under the current methodology they open first and close last. Member states use them as the final gate, and closing them demands a track record of prosecutions and convictions rather than legislative promises. Building such a record takes years, not months.
The second risk is political appetite in the Union itself. Several governments face electorates unenthusiastic about enlargement in any form, and a country that closes all its chapters still needs a unanimous accession treaty and twenty-seven ratifications. Montenegro’s population of roughly 620,000 makes it the least disruptive possible new member, which is the strongest argument its diplomats deploy.
Missing the 2026 deadline would not derail anything. It would, though, cost the government the narrative it has built at home and hand ammunition to those who argue the process rewards nobody. Watch the autumn accession conference. Two or three more chapters keeps the story alive. Fewer than that turns the end-2026 goal into a phrase officials stop repeating.
