PODGORICA, Montenegro — Fourteen years after it began, Montenegro’s negotiation to join the European Union is over. Officials in Brussels and Podgorica announced on Friday that the last three of 33 policy chapters, covering competition, the environment, and the budget, had been provisionally closed, leaving only the drafting of an accession treaty and its ratification by every member state.
“We have been told for a decade that the door was open,” said Milica Radović, Montenegro’s chief negotiator, at a news conference in Podgorica. “Today we are standing in the doorway. The rest is paperwork, and I say that with full respect for paperwork.”
The European Commission said it would propose the treaty text by spring, with a target of signature in late 2027 and accession on Jan. 1, 2028. That would make Montenegro, which has 620,000 people and already uses the euro without being a member of the currency union, the bloc’s 28th member and the first to join since Croatia in 2013.
The closing of the final chapters followed a two-year push in which Montenegro adopted 140 laws, replaced the leadership of its prosecution service, and secured convictions in three high-profile organized crime cases that Brussels had cited as benchmarks. The commission’s report accompanying the announcement praised progress on the judiciary while noting “persistent concerns” about media ownership and the capacity of the public administration.
“Montenegro has done what was asked, and it has done it faster than anyone expected,” said Katarina Novak, the commission’s spokeswoman for enlargement. “Ratification is a political process in 27 capitals. We are not naïve about that. But we are confident.”
Analysts in the region said the significance extended well beyond Montenegro. “For 10 years, enlargement was a word people said at summits,” said Vuk Perović, the director of the Adriatic Policy Institute in Podgorica. “Serbia, Albania, North Macedonia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Moldova, Ukraine — they have all been told to be patient. Now there is a date. A date changes what politicians in those countries can promise.”
In Podgorica on Friday evening, the government lit the parliament building in blue and gold, and a few hundred people gathered in the square outside. Among them was Jovana Mijović, 23, a law student who said she had been 9 when the talks began. “I have spent my whole life being told we were almost there,” she said. “I will believe it when my passport goes through the short line.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 5 of the European edition with the headline: Montenegro Closes Its Last E.U. Negotiating Chapters, Setting Up a Race to Join by 2028.
