Roadmaps for Montenegro, Albania, Moldova and Ukraine - for Macedonia, only a message to Sofia

Ursula von der Leyen announced that the European Commission is preparing roadmaps for the countries furthest along in negotiations. Marta Kos listed them: Montenegro, Albania, Moldova, Ukraine. Macedonia is not on the list.

The enlargement commissioner said so in an interview with Bulgarian National Television, on the margins of the European Parliament's plenary session in Strasbourg. For Macedonia she had a different sentence - that progress by the two most advanced Western Balkan countries could encourage our country to move forward too.

Encouragement. Not a roadmap.

The condition, repeated once more

Asked by a journalist how the EU can get Skopje to carry out the constitutional amendments, Kos answered with a formulation we know by heart.

"Certainly, the government in North Macedonia has to keep its promise. They have to change their Constitution, this was agreed between North Macedonia and the 27 EU member states. Once this is done, I will count on the support of your country so that we can move forward with North Macedonia as well," she said.

Notice who the second half of that sentence is addressed to. Not Skopje - Sofia. Kos is telling Bulgaria that after our constitutional amendments, its support is expected.

Expected. Not guaranteed.

Why the gap between an expectation and a guarantee is the whole story

The constitutional amendments are a concrete political obligation within the accession process. But after them, every ordinary European criterion remains: rule of law, independent institutions, the fight against corruption, public administration reform, alignment with European legislation. Meeting the condition can untie the political knot. It cannot substitute for the reforms.

The resistance among the Macedonian public does not come only from the content of the amendment, but from the absence of trust. Part of the public believes the state is once again accepting a condition with no clear guarantee that measurable progress follows it.

Dimitar Nikolovski of Eurothink sees the same mechanism: "That is a definitively set-in-concrete position that has been repeated many times," he says of the constitutional amendments question.

Canada, for comparison

In the same speech, von der Leyen invited Canada to become the European Union's first associate member. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney welcomed the proposal before the European Parliament.

"Canada welcomes this ambition and I can tell you that polls show an overwhelming majority of Canadians support much closer ties with Europe," he said.

Canada is not a candidate country and is not seeking full membership - the positions are not the same and should not be conflated. But one conclusion suggests itself: the EU is becoming more flexible toward those who are not waiting in the queue, at the very moment it repeats the same old condition to those who are.

Nikolovski names the trend: enlargement is moving toward differentiation, where countries that progress get an ever clearer perspective and timetable, while Macedonia stays blocked.

This autumn, according to Kos, will be "the autumn of enlargement". The question is whether it is an autumn for us, or just another date.