Bosnia and Herzegovina's readiness to join the European Union did not just stall over the past year. It went into reverse. A tracker built entirely on the EU's own assessments now scores the country at 2.91 out of 10 for 2025, down from 4.14 a year earlier — a fall of nearly a third, and the steepest single-year drop of any candidate on the list.
The figure comes from the Integration Readiness Index (readinessindex.eu), published by the think tank EPIC and co-published with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation. The index scores ten candidate countries from 0 to 10 across the years 2021 to 2025, and it does so using one source only: the European Commission's annual progress reports. That design matters here. The drop is not an outside critic marking Bosnia down. It is Brussels' own verdict, converted into a number.
The 2025 scores sort the candidates into clear tiers. Montenegro leads at 6.8, with Albania close behind at 6.7. Then come the two war-time applicants, Moldova at 5.87 and Ukraine at 5.85, now ahead of the long-standing Western Balkan pair Serbia and North Macedonia, both on 5.5. Below them sits a struggling group: Kosovo at 3.61, Georgia at 3.26, Bosnia at 2.91 and Türkiye at 2.81.
Bosnia's place in that bottom group is new. At 4.14 in 2024 it sat in the middle of the pack. The 2025 reading of 2.91 drops it almost to the level of Türkiye, a candidate the same index describes as having spent years drifting away from Europe rather than towards it. The index measures distance from a finish line it defines as Croatia in 2011 — the last country to complete accession. On that yardstick, Bosnia has moved backwards.
The collapse tracks a process that has jammed. Bosnia became a candidate country in December 2022, and in March 2024 the European Council agreed to open accession negotiations — a decision widely read at the time as a reward for reform momentum. Since then the momentum has drained away. The country still has to deliver on the 14 key priorities the Commission set out back in 2019, covering the rule of law, the fight against corruption and organised crime, public administration and constitutional and electoral reform.
Delivery has been close to non-existent. By mid-2026, analysts tracking Bosnia's commitments counted 113 reform promises still unmet, with core measures — a new law on the State Court, a law on the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council, and the appointment of an operational chief negotiator to run the screening process — all still pending. An accession process cannot advance without a negotiator to run it, and Bosnia has not managed to name one.
The block is largely political. Milorad Dodik, the leader of Republika Srpska, one of Bosnia's two constituent entities, opposes reforms he reads as centralising power in the hands of the state at the entity's expense. He has pushed a secessionist agenda across the military, the tax system and the judiciary, and has floated a referendum in which, by his own account, Republika Srpska would decline to back European integration. A process that requires the whole country to move in one direction cannot move when one half is threatening to walk in the other.
The EU has struggled to respond. Member states cannot agree on whether to sanction Dodik, with Hungary and Croatia among those resisting punitive measures. Without that leverage, Brussels has little to push against — and the progress reports that feed the index have recorded the drift year on year.
An index like this one is only as interesting as the story it tells, and Bosnia's fall tells a pointed one. Enlargement is not a ratchet that only turns forwards. When reforms stop and politics harden, a candidate can lose ground in the EU's own eyes — and the paperwork will show it. The contrast with the top of the table is the lesson. Montenegro and Albania are closing chapters and setting membership target dates; Ukraine and Moldova, despite a war, have overtaken candidates that applied decades earlier. Bosnia shows the opposite path: a country that won the political prize of opened negotiations in 2024 and then failed to use it. For a Union that keeps insisting enlargement is back on the agenda, the more awkward question is what it does about a candidate moving the wrong way — and whether it has any tools left to change that direction.
