EU Commission scrambles to keep pace with Moldova's accession push

The European Commission is redirecting internal resources to Moldova’s enlargement process, after Chișinău’s reform pace outstripped the department’s capacity to keep up with it, EU officials told Euronews.

The Moldovan government has pushed through required reforms so quickly that the Commission is now playing catch-up, reallocating existing resources to keep tabs on progress.

“Moldova’s impressive record of EU reforms is paying off. I had a good call with new Prime Minister Vasile Tofan during which we discussed the next steps on Moldova’s EU accession path,” Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos wrote on X on Tuesday.

The Commission’s enlargement department, already stretched thin by simultaneous progress across several candidate countries, has had to shift resources towards the best-performing ones.

Forging ahead

Chișinău has pushed hard on EU-required reforms since Maia Sandu became president in 2020, installing a pro-EU government with a comfortable parliamentary majority.

“The reforms that we are undertaking in the last five years are really unprecedented,” Cristina Gherasimov, Moldova’s Deputy Prime Minister for European Integration, told the press at the margins of a ministerial meeting on Friday.

“Our formula for these reforms to be successful is the political will and the determination of our people to work strongly in favour of the current window of opportunity that exists in the European Union,” she said.

The Commission, in turn, must verify that candidates are getting the reforms right, meaning it has to match its expertise to the pace each country can realistically sustain.

Kyiv is also advancing its reform agenda, which gained fresh momentum when Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi took office in July. However, the country’s war effort and budgetary strain continue to weigh on its accession bid.

On Tuesday, the IMF released a report analysing the potential economic benefits of EU membership for the Western Balkan countries and Moldova, excluding Ukraine because of its “much larger size and ongoing military conflict.”

This rapid technical progress sits awkwardly against the political reality in the Council of the EU, where Ukraine and Moldova’s accession tracks remain linked.

Political coupling

“Coupling” refers to the informal practice of linking two countries’ accession processes.

Grouping countries is particularly useful during ratification, since it allows member states to ratify a single accession treaty — as was the case when Romania and Bulgaria joined the bloc in 2007.

Ukraine and Moldova began their accession tracks together in 2022, just days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In December 2023, EU leaders opened accession negotiations with both countries simultaneously.

Kyiv’s process was then blocked for two years by a veto from Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, rooted in bilateral disputes over the treatment of the Hungarian minority in Ukraine’s eastern Transcarpathia region.

Momentum returned after Péter Magyar’s Tisza party ousted Orbán from power in April, prompting Budapest and Kyiv to open negotiations to resolve the bilateral disputes. In June, Hungary lifted its veto on the first negotiation cluster.

The second of six clusters opened in July. Since then, however, Hungary has slowed the process again, as over a decade of anti-Ukraine rhetoric under Orbán makes rapid progress hard for many Hungarians to accept.

Although the friction is a purely bilateral matter between Ukraine and Hungary, the coupling means Moldova has been caught in the slipstream.

Expected departure

The coupling was driven by major geopolitical considerations. Moldova has long had a Russian military presence in Transnistria, meaning that when war broke out in 2022, the country found itself behind the front line, with Russian troops on its own territory.

The coupling matters deeply to Kyiv too, which sees the prospect of future EU membership as a lifeline anchoring the country outside Russia’s sphere of influence.

Since Moldova joined the enlargement track alongside Ukraine, the argument goes that Chișinău forging ahead alone while Kyiv is bogged down in bilateral disputes would send the wrong political signal.

That is why Ukraine’s main enlargement supporters, notably the Baltic states, have pushed to maintain the coupling throughout the cluster-opening phase.

But the technical side of accession, the reforms themselves, does not have to wait for the political track to catch up.

EU officials expect the coupling of the two eastern European countries to hold until all remaining clusters are opened. From that point, the situation is expected to shift quickly, provided Moldova keeps up its reform momentum.

“We have an ambitious target to be ready to close negotiations by early 2028,” Gherasimov said.

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