\u201cWe believe that now is the time to open accession talks with both countries,\u201d European Council President Donald Tusk, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, European Parliament President David Sassoli and Ursula von der Leyen, president-elect of European Commission, said in a joint letter addressing the EU members.<\/p>\n
The letter recalled that they agreed to reach a “clear and substantive” decision to start accession talks with North Macedonia and Albania no later than October 2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhether the EU decides now to open accession talks with North Macedonia and Albania is a test of the Union\u2019s ability to deliver on its promises and look to the future,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n
Underlining that North Macedonia and Albania did what the EU asked them to do, they said that both countries are aware that the membership will not happen overnight.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is no guarantee of success. There will be a lot of hard work on reforms along the way,\u201d it added.<\/p>\n
Accession negotiations must be concluded before a new member state can join the EU.<\/p>\n
They take place between ministers and ambassadors of the EU governments and the candidate country.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt entails rigorous screening of the candidate country’s legislation; negotiations then proceed methodically through the range of EU legislation, which the candidate country must adopt, implement and enforce,” according to the EU.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The European Union’s top leaders Thursday urged the bloc to start accession talks with North Macedonia and Albania to include them in the EU. \u201cWe believe that now is the time to open accession talks with both countries,\u201d European Council President Donald Tusk, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, European Parliament President David Sassoli and Ursula …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":64291,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,63,17,1,118,101],"tags":[73540,12834],"class_list":["post-64290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-breaking-news","category-daily","category-europe","category-general","category-hot","category-politics","tag-albania","tag-macedonia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64290\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}