After years of slower and often merely declarative progress towards membership of the European Union, it is increasingly being said in Brussels that Serbia has a "window of opportunity" that it should seize, because it will not remain open for long. It is precisely in this context that the proposal has emerged to form a special operational team that should speed up the fulfilment of obligations from the Reform Agenda and demonstrate that Belgrade has both the political will and the administrative capacity to seriously tackle reforms.
The idea is that, through a small but operational team, with clear tasks and daily communication, work will be accelerated in those areas that have for years represented a bottleneck in negotiations with the European Union, primarily in the field of the rule of law.
The proposal to form an operational team for Serbia’s European path was announced by President Aleksandar Vučić during a session of the Government in Belgrade, with the assessment that it is necessary to strengthen capacities so that Serbia can progress more quickly on its European path and so that matters, where possible, can be handled significantly faster than before.
The operational team
The head of Serbia’s Mission to the European Union in Brussels, Danijel Apostolović, has been proposed as the president of this operational team, while its members would include ministers Starović, Mali and Vujić, as well as the President of the National Assembly, Ana Brnabić.
Serbia’s Ambassador to the EU, Danijel Apostolović, stated that there is a good basis for progress in the pre-accession negotiations with the European Union, especially following, as he said, good meetings between President Aleksandar Vučić and the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and the President of the European Council, António Costa. However, Apostolović warns that work on meeting the conditions must be carried out much faster.
"If I were to give you a realistic assessment of the state of the negotiation process, the Government might even dismiss me. I would just like to say that we must engage to the maximum in fulfilling the interim benchmarks for chapters 23 and 24 on the rule of law. The Ministry of Justice has significantly accelerated its work, but it has to be twice as fast. If the European Commission is ready and wants us to complete certain things by the end of the Cypriot presidency, it is impossible for our plans to state that we will only adopt those laws at the end of this year," Apostolović said at a thematic session of the Government of Serbia.
He added that his suggestion and request is for each minister individually to review the European Commission's annual progress report, "for each individual chapter", in order to clearly see where the delays are and what specifically needs to be done.
The operational team should consist of between eight and ten people and should be in constant contact, including daily conference calls.
As we heard at the session, the Serbian President will be fully involved in the work as well, through daily reports on the results achieved.
Mali: The credit rating depends on the European path
The importance of this step was also discussed by Siniša Mali, speaking as a guest on RTS’s morning programme, underlining that Serbia’s credit rating also depends on its European path.
"It is good that Apostolović will be there to push everything forward, because he is in Belgium. We will make an effort, as the President has announced, to fully align all national laws and by-laws with EU legislation by the end of the year. When we will become a full member does not depend on us. In that context, there are several objectives, and the deadline is the end of the year," the Minister of Finance assessed.
(EUpravo zato)
