Almost a quarter of a century later, Pedro Sánchez has returned this Friday to the Balkans, a region that he knew first-hand in the late 1990s when he was part of the team of former Spanish Foreign Minister Carlos Westendorp, then High Commissioner for the EU in war-torn Bosnia. The current president has become the first head of the Spanish government to set foot in Belgrade, the current capital of Serbia and the former heart of the Yugoslav federation, which imploded in a chain of ethnic conflicts that lasted almost a decade.
The 72-hour tour will take you through the four former Yugoslav republics that are not yet part of the EU (Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia itself and North Macedonia), as well as neighboring Albania. The exception will be the former Serbian province of Kosovo, whose unilateral independence in 2008 is not recognized by five of the 27 EU members: Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Slovakia and Spain.
Belgrade has been adorned with Spanish and Serbian flags, some of them bright and gigantic, while President Alexandar Vucic has received Sánchez as a “sincere friend” of Serbia and has thanked him for his “great support” in the dispute with Pristina . Sánchez, for his part, has supported the solution of the conflict through dialogue, but has stressed that Spain “has been and will be on the side of Serbia” in its defense of international law and the “territorial integrity” of states.
It is not the only reason for gratitude from the Serbian president to his guest. Sánchez has shown himself to be a firm defender of Serbia’s entry into the European club and has stressed that it is time to speed up a process with little progress since it began in 2012. The war in Ukraine, recalled the head of the Spanish Government, has reopened the prospects for enlarging the EU which, after accelerating the approval of the candidacies of Ukraine and Moldova, has unblocked the talks for the entry of Albania and North Macedonia, blocked for years.
Instead, the two leaders, who have not admitted questions from journalists, have tiptoed over one of the thorniest points: Serbia’s refusal to support EU sanctions on Russia for the invasion of Ukraine. Vucic limited himself to pointing out that he had explained to Sánchez Belgrade’s position in the face of a war that “it would be better to end as soon as possible”: while Sánchez recalled that the Serbian president, who was in Madrid a day before the invasion, warned him of his imminent character. The majority of the Serbian population, who still remembers the NATO bombing of Belgrade in 1999, does not blame Putin for the conflict, but the alleged expansion plans of the Atlantic Alliance, according to polls.
This Saturday, Sánchez will visit Sarajevo and Mostar, the Ottoman city where Spanish soldiers interposed themselves between the contenders, today converted into a busy tourist center. Despite this, interethnic tensions have not disappeared and the recent NATO summit in Madrid singled out Bosnia, along with Georgia and Moldova, as one of the three vulnerable states in which the Kremlin’s hand is trying to destabilize the West.
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The Spanish president will meet in Sarajevo with the presidents of the three communities that coexist in the country (Serbs, Croats and Bosnian-Muslims) and take turns leading the joint Presidency. Among them will be the Serbian Milorad Dodik, who does not hide his plan to disengage from the federation and move towards secession from the Republika Srpska. For Sánchez, the way to neutralize these movements is to prevent Bosnia from being dropped from the EU integration process and grant it the status of a candidate country, just like its neighbors, even if it does not meet many of the requirements.
Sánchez’s tour of the five Balkan states, embedded in the last weekend before the summer holidays, is a necessary preparation for the Spanish presidency of the EU that will take place in the second half of 2023, when he will have to deal with one of the most troubled neighborhoods in the Union. For this reason, the only senior official accompanying him is Aurora Mejía, director of the EU department in Moncloa. The problem is that the lack of relations between Spain and Kosovo (which participates in the annual EU summits with the Blacans) limits its capacity as an interlocutor, according to community sources.
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