The head of the European Parliamentary Delegation for Southeastern
Europe, Eduard Kukan, encouraged the Albanian politicians to continue
with the positive atmosphere created after the elections of the June
23rd elections, and reminded that integration is being made for the
Albanian citizens.
The agreement between the five most powerful members of the block to not give the vote in favor of the candidate status for Albania postpones the decision until June 2014. In an interview for Deutsche Welle, Kukan confirmed that this development wasn’t completely unexpected for him.
“It’s not a big surprise that some European Union members expressed their reserves regarding Albania’s candidate status. I think that even the Albanian politicians were expecting this. However, we all hoped on a positive decision, which unfortunately didn’t happen. I think that the postponement of the status was not the right think, since it is simply encouragement for the political forces, without any further concrete implication in the integration process”, Kukan declared.
For Kukan, the skepticism of Germany, France, Great Britain, Netherlands and Denmark insinuates the desire of these three countries to give more important evidence that the new atmosphere in the country will be positive and stable, and that the fight against corruption will be efficient and with concrete results.
Practically, what the countries in question are claiming is some kind of track record that proves the stability and concrete results.
According to Kukan, their countries have also been affected by the lessons taken from the membership of Romania and Bulgaria, which pushes them to be more careful and support the idea that the criteria need to be completed until a given period, during which it is very necessary to realize the reforms.
He reminded to the five countries in question that it is about the status, not for the date of accession, which might require 8-10 years.
“We shouldn’t forget this. It seems that the requests of some European Union member countries are confusing these two phases of the process. They should be more objective and more realistic”, Kukan declared.
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