Bulgaria hopes for Schengen membership before year’s end

Bulgaria will have two opportunities to join the visa-free Schengen zone this year, namely in October and December, Bulgarian Prime Minister Nikolai Denkov announced on Sunday.

Bulgaria and Romania are both vying for Schengen membership, but the Netherlands and Austria continue to block the process, citing insufficient control of irregular migration flows as problematic. While the Netherlands and Austria blocked Bulgaria’s Schengen membership, Romania’s was blocked only by Austria.

“I cannot guarantee that we will become part of Schengen in October,” the Bulgarian prime minister admitted, referring to the election campaign in the Netherlands, which, alongside Austria, continues to oppose Bulgarian membership because Bulgaria does not do enough to prevent irregular migration flows from the EU’s external border with Turkey‐ a point Denkov believes the Dutch will focus on during the campaign.

Still, Denkov is confident that the Spanish EU Council presidency will help Bulgaria and Romania’s Schengen membership bid, noting that it promised that the next chance for Bulgaria and Romania will be in December.

The Bulgarian prime minister also claims that Spain supports both countries, and one of the priorities in the presidency is the admission of Bulgaria and Romania to Schengen. Denkov says that if Bulgaria fulfils all commitments and adopts the necessary legislation, no one will have a substantial argument against the country’s acceptance into Schengen.

Earlier in 2023, the Netherlands began giving diplomatic signals that it might lift the veto on Bulgaria, which would have left Austria isolated in the EU on this issue. One of the reasons was the significant judicial reform in Bulgaria and the Commission’s decision to end the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM) in the two Balkan countries.

The situation’s development gave Sofia and Bucharest great hope that they could be accepted into Schengen in the autumn of this year. In early July, however, Mark Rutte’s coalition government in the Netherlands resigned after coalition partners disagreed on the country’s immigration policy. This returned the admission process of both countries to a state of uncertainty.

Bulgaria hopes to soften Rutte’s position because of the support given to Ukraine and the judicial reform, but also for a victory for the coalition between the Dutch centre-left party PvdA (S&D) and GroenLinks (Greens). The left leads the polls in the country after joining forces ahead of the upcoming early elections for the national parliament in November.

One of the contenders for the leader of the list of the Dutch left is former EU Commission vice president Frans Timmermans, who announced in July that he would leave his post in Brussels to participate in the elections in the Netherlands.

Timmermans has argued for years that Bulgaria and Romania should become part of Schengen.

(Krassen Nikolov | EURACTIV.bg)