Shën Stefan, Mal i Zi, 22 tetor 2026
Dear Prime Minister Spajić,
Dear Chancellor Merz,
Dear Chancellor Stocker,
Dear colleagues and friends from the European Union and the Western Balkans,
Prime Minister, congratulations to the Government and the people of Montenegro on their progress towards the Union, and thank you for hosting the 13th Berlin Process Summit. In Kosova, you have a European neighbour cheering on your success.
The Berlin Process, launched by Germany in 2014, is where the six of us meet as equals, and it gave us the Common Regional Market, based on the EU’s four freedoms.
Through gradual integration, the Union is now opening parts of its Single Market to us too: SEPA will soon save our citizens and diaspora 58 million euros a year, Green Lanes will accelerate trade with the EU, and with Roam Like at Home, staying connected will cost the same there as here. This is the Union reaching our citizens before membership, and Kosova will stay the course.
How fast we get there depends on decisions that are not ours alone. Some of them are taken here, where good neighbourly relations should rest on trust, and trust rests on democratic affinities.
Citizens across our region should be able to study in one country, work in another and retire in a third. In 2022, all six of us signed agreements on diplomas and ID cards. Agreements are meant to be kept, yet four years later, a few still block ours, because the agreements bring EU standards.
No one can be forced to desire the European Union, but no one should be able to hold back those who do.
As for Kosova, measure us by what the Union asks of a candidate.
We uphold the values of Article 2, and independent evaluations place us among the countries with the greatest democratic progress in Southern Europe, from the fight against corruption to the rule of law. In foreign policy, we act as a member: from day one, we have applied every EU sanction against Russia, and in Kosova, Moscow has never found a crack in Europe.
Dear colleagues,
We have done what was ours alone to do. Kosova’s application has waited since December 2022 for a decision that is the EU’s alone. Until then, we remain the only country in the Western Balkans without candidate status.
We ask you to take that decision: to request the Commission’s Opinion, to grant Kosova candidate status and to open accession negotiations.
Stability bought at the expense of neighbouring democracies has proven a dangerous myth, because those who create instability cannot guarantee stability. That has often been the case in our region.
Beyond the battlefield in Ukraine, Russia has turned what connects the Union into a target: its airspace, its undersea cables, its critical infrastructure, and even its people, through acts of terror. Each attack is kept small and deniable, beneath the threshold of a joint response, but together they aim at the whole. Europe as such.
In Kosova, a neighbour has used the same tradecraft, for the same ends, against our state. Last month, we marked three years since the terrorist attack in the northern village of Banjska that left our police sergeant Afrim Bunjaku dead. Next month, we will mark two years since the kinetic warfare unfolded as an assault on our critical infrastructure, blowing up the Ibër-Lepenc water supply canal in the northern village of Varaga. Both were built to be deniable. The man who has admitted responsibility for Banjska, Milan Radoiçiq, a criminal and a local proxy, still roams free, out in the open, sheltered by the very same state apparatus.
An attack on a European democracy is an attack on all of Europe, and deserves a collective answer, because a response built case by case is not deterrence. For Kosova, NATO membership brings deterrence too.
Dear friends,
Minority rights also deserve a common answer in the Berlin Process. Almost every majority in our region is a minority across the border, and when rights stop there, that asymmetry is an injustice.
I call on you to look closely at the Presheva Valley, where Albanians are being pushed, step by step, out of institutional, public and civic life, until staying becomes harder than leaving.
Yet human dignity and human rights comes first among the values we should share together.
Thank you.
