By one measure, Albania is almost level with the country everyone expects to join the European Union next. By another, it is fourteen years behind it. Both measures are right, and the difference between them explains what Tirana has to do in the next fifteen months.
The first measure is EPIC's Integration Readiness Index (readinessindex.eu), co-published with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation in June 2026 by Antonios Nestoras, Emil Kirjas and Bernada Cunj. It scores the ten candidate countries from 0 to 10 for each year from 2021 to 2025, using only the European Commission's own annual progress reports as source material. The 2025 field reads: Montenegro 6.8, Albania 6.7, Moldova 5.87, Ukraine 5.85, Serbia 5.5, North Macedonia 5.5, Kosovo 3.61, Georgia 3.26, Bosnia and Herzegovina 2.91, Türkiye 2.81.
The second measure is the one negotiators in Brussels use. On 14 July 2026, the day the Council held accession conferences with Montenegro, Albania and Moldova back to back, Montenegro provisionally closed chapters 8 and 29 and Ireland's European affairs minister Thomas Byrne announced that "with 18 chapters now provisionally closed, more than half-way to the end, Montenegro remains the frontrunner". The same day Albania closed its first three chapters ever: science and research, education and culture, and external relations. All 33 of Albania's chapters are open; three are shut.
The index is built from five indicators: State of Play, Annual Progress, Recommendation Delivery, Chapter Status and Accession Momentum. Chapter Status is one fifth of the picture, and even there the index reads the Commission's own assessment of preparedness across policy areas rather than simply totting up closures. The other four indicators reward movement. Annual Progress and Accession Momentum measure whether a country is doing more this year than last; Recommendation Delivery measures whether it acted on what the Commission asked of it.
That construction is deliberate. The index benchmarks every candidate against Croatia in 2011, the last country to complete accession, and asks how far each one is from that finish line. A country that is closing chapters quickly from a low base and clearing the Commission's benchmarks on time can therefore score almost as high as one that has been closing chapters for a decade. Montenegro opened negotiations in 2012. Albania held its first intergovernmental conference in July 2022 and only received the positive interim benchmark assessment on the rule-of-law chapters, the gate to closing anything at all, on 26 May 2026. Seven weeks later it had closed three chapters. The index sees that acceleration; the chapter count sees three.
The score is useful to Tirana in one way. It supports the argument that Albania belongs in the front group alongside Montenegro, rather than in the second tier with Serbia and North Macedonia, both of which sit at 5.5 despite Serbia having opened talks in 2014 and North Macedonia having waited for its start since 2005. On the index, Albania has overtaken candidates that started years earlier. That is a story about reform delivery, and it is the story Albania's government tells.
The score does not, however, shorten the road. Albania's stated aim is to conclude negotiations in 2027 and to be ready for membership by 2030. Concluding negotiations means provisionally closing all 33 chapters. Montenegro took fourteen years to close 18 and hopes to finish the rest this year. Croatia, the benchmark, closed 35 chapters in roughly six years of talks between 2005 and 2011. Albania is asking to close 30 in about fifteen months. Nothing in the index says that is impossible, because the index measures pace and Albania's pace is the fastest in the field. But the index cannot substitute for the closures themselves, and the Council will judge 2027 on the count, not the score.
There is a further caveat that applies to every reading of this index. Because it is built exclusively from Commission progress reports, it measures what the Commission has chosen to write down, in the Commission's own categories. A candidate that satisfies the Commission's benchmarks will score well whether or not the reforms behind them hold. Albania's closures so far are in the least contentious chapters. The test of the index's optimism will come when the rule-of-law chapters, 23 and 24, come up for closure, because those are the chapters where the Commission's reports and the reality on the ground have most often diverged in the Western Balkans.
Enlargement is about to be measured in public. The Commission's autumn progress reports will feed the next vintage of EPIC's index, and the Council's autumn accession conferences will add to the chapter count. Albania will do well on the first and, on current form, less well on the second, and the two numbers will be quoted against each other in Tirana and Brussels alike. The honest reading is that they answer different questions. The index says Albania is moving faster than any other candidate and is close to the front-runner in readiness. The chapter count says the front-runner is fifteen chapters ahead. For a country that has set itself a deadline of next year, the second number is the one that counts, and the first is the reason anyone believes the deadline is worth setting.
