European leaders gather in the small port town of Tivat on Friday as Montenegro pulls ahead of several contenders in its bid to join the European Union by 2028, leaving many Balkan neighbours behind.
EU flags and Montenegro’s red-and-gold banner lined the country’s winding Adriatic roads, greeting delegations who began arriving on Thursday for the annual EU-Western Balkans Summit.
By Thursday afternoon, security checkpoints and a heavy police presence surrounded the luxurious waterfront hotels of its port, famed for its visiting superyachts and mountainous limestone surroundings.
Key figures from Brussels will be joined by the heads of Europe’s largest economies, including France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Friedrich Merz, to speak with regional leaders later on Friday.
Montenegro and Albania have emerged as frontrunners to join the bloc, outpacing other Balkan neighbours, such as Serbia and Bosnia, which lag behind on the required reforms.
“For us, the enlargement, namely to the Western Balkans, is the most important geopolitical investment that the European Union is doing,” European Council President Antonio Costa said in Belgrade on Thursday during a tour of the region.
“And for this purpose we need to work harder and faster,” he said, describing the joint work needed from the bloc and candidate countries.
After decades of uncertainty about the future membership of the six Western Balkan nations, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 renewed Brussels’s interest in expanding the bloc.
Since the war began, both Ukraine and Moldova have joined the queue of countries seeking accession alongside Balkan hopefuls, Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia.
Montenegro’s progress on reforms has prompted the EU’s enlargement commissioner to flag the possibility of completing technical negotiations by the end of the year, clearing the way for it to become the 28th EU state by the end of 2028.
A flashy ‘28 by 28’ government website boasts that the NATO member is the ‘Epicentre of Euro-optimism’, with public support for the bloc at 80 per cent.
The same tagline also adorns the livery of its flagship carrier.
“The European Union-Western Balkans summit in Tivat is the most significant and largest international event in modern Montenegro,” President Jakov Milatovic wrote in an op-ed published by local media earlier this week.
“Montenegro, as the 28th member of the European Union by 2028, is a task we must complete,” he wrote.
Already a tourist hotspot, with its historic old towns and idyllic beaches, Montenegro has been angling toward the bloc for years, adopting the euro in 2002 and applying for membership in 2008.
Montenegro’s progress is notably different from that of other Balkan EU candidates, including Serbia, from which Montenegro separated in 2006.
Kosovo’s path remains among the most complicated, with five EU member states still refusing to recognise its independence.
Earlier this year, the EU’s enlargement commissioner, Marta Kos, warned that several Western Balkan countries risked permanently losing hundreds of millions of euros in growth funds due to slow reforms and has specifically singled out Serbia for ‘backsliding’.
Montenegro and Serbia, which still maintains strong ties with Moscow despite its stated goal of joining the bloc, have traded increasingly caustic accusations of interference recently.
A diplomatic row between the two, which escalated into Belgrade levelling accusations of lax security protocols ahead of the conference, almost derailed Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic’s trip to Tivat on Thursday.
But Vucic confirmed he would still attend, joining other regional leaders, including Albania’s Edi Rama, who is vying to follow Montenegro into the EU in 2029.
