BELGRADE – Speaking for the Radio-Television of Serbia on Tuesday evening, President of Serbia Aleksandar Vučić announced that no Serbian official would represent Serbia at the EU-Western Balkans Summit, which is taking place today in Brussels.
“I believe that I am protecting Serbia and its interests with this step, because we must show what it is that we have done, and we have done a lot”, said Vučić, seemingly referring to the fact that there was once more no consensus on opening Cluster 3 with Serbia.
Minister of European Integration of Serbia Nemanja Starović confirmed that this was indeed the case in a post on X today, in which he endorsed the President’s decision.
“By the short-sighted lack of willingness to recognize the results of reforms over the past four years, starting with the constitutional amendments at the beginning of 2022 and onward, through a single symbolic procedural step in the accession negotiations, a very bad message has been sent to the citizens of our country – one that only fuels anti-European narratives and discourages those who are driving reform processes in society”, Starović wrote.
By Serbia’s absence from today’s meeting, Starović wrote, it is not only defending the dignity of its people, “but also the integrity of the accession process, as well as the credibility of the European idea in Serbia”.
“With gratitude to colleagues from the European Commission, as well as to numerous EU member states…, I express the hope that the remaining member states will soon join the political consensus necessary to overcome the stalemate to which Serbia has been subjected without sufficient substantive reasons”, Starović concluded.
In his interview for RTS last night, President Vučić said that, even though Serbia was going to be absent from today’s summit, he was thankful to the respect shown by Presidents of the European Council and European Commission, António Costa and Ursula von der Leyen, as well as the French President Emmanuel Macron, with whom he spoke the night before.
The annual EU-Western Balkans Summit will take place today afternoon in Brussels. The Summits have become regular yearly events since 2020.
According to the announcement, the meeting, chaired by President António Costa, “will serve as an opportunity to demonstrate and reconfirm the strength of the EU-Western Balkans strategic relationship and the benefits it brings to citizens”.
Serbian officials made another effort to open Cluster 3 in negotiations with the EU in recent weeks, but there was no consensus in the Council on that decision. The quality of some of the steps that were taken, particularly the unfinished election of the new members of the electronic media regulator, was criticised by the opposition and civil society.
In 2022, Serbia almost withdrew from the EU-Western Balkans Summit in Tirana, over the dispute with Kosovo concerning the situation in the Serb-majority north. Ultimately, Vučić participated in the Summit.
