A few moments before the limousine with the German Chancellor rolls up, a Serbian soldier springs into action. A small stairway leads up to the podium, on which Olaf Scholz and his host Aleksandar Vučić will soon be listening to the German and Serbian national anthems, which the not-so-slim soldier now checks with two quick hops. Then he runs over the platform to the small staircase that leads down again. The soldier jumps, the stairs stop.
Scholz is a guest in Serbia for almost three hours during his two-day tour of the Balkans. Three hours in which nothing should go wrong and nothing is left to chance. A Chancellor’s visit to a country like Serbia is an event that is televised live minute by minute and no one sums up its significance more succinctly than host Vučić.
“Of course, I’m the President of a country for which it’s much more important to talk to the German Chancellor than it would be important for the German Chancellor to talk to me,” Vučić begins the press conference in the very spacious and rather Yugoslav presidential palace. Scholz, who seems a good bit shorter than usual next to the Lulatsch Vučić, listens unperturbed to the translation, but presumably does not only now suspect that trouble is imminent.
Vučić thanks his guest, then reprimands and lectures him
Scholz completed five stations in two days. This is supposed to be a “new start” for the Western Balkans’ path to the EU, which hasn’t seemed to end for years. In 2003 in Thessaloniki, the EU heads of state and government promised: “The future of the Balkan states lies in the European Union.” In which belief in the region has clearly dwindled after almost 20 years. The chancellor has come to change that. “It’s about time this promise was followed by deeds,” he said the next day in North Macedonia. Here and now, in the presidential palace in Belgrade, Scholz first has to experience how quickly you can run into a wall in this area.
In his six months in office, Scholz has already experienced a lot, but not this kind of rhetorical roller coaster ride, on which his host will soon drag him along. Vučić thanks “very much” for the chancellor’s offers of help. Vučić praised the chancellor and said he “actually” brought a prospect of EU enlargement with him, adding: “It’s not like it was in the past. That’s an important message for all of us in the Western Balkans.” Then again he reprimands his guest, lecturing him that Serbia doesn’t react to anything like pressure.
Scholz came to Belgrade from Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, where he pointed out that it was inconceivable “that two countries that do not recognize each other become members of the EU.” Had the chancellor announced the discovery of a new solar system, the Serbian president could hardly have been more amazed. “We’ve never heard that before,” he says. “We haven’t heard from anyone in Europe that mutual recognition is required.” Scholz replied succinctly that he “said something that is obvious; maybe that will help”.
Rather not. That doesn’t surprise him, Vucic remarks pointedly, the situation is constantly changing “to the detriment of or to the detriment of Serbia.” Vučić also reacted evasively to Scholz’s request that Serbia join the sanctions against Russia. The “specificity of the situation in connection with Kosovo and also with regard to energy relations and traditional relations with the Russian Federation” should be taken into account. The Serb recently spoke to Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin on the phone. He was then able to announce that Serbia would receive gas from Russia for a further three years – at an “extremely cheap” price.
When Scholz dines with heads of state and government from the region in Thessaloniki of all places, he can only hope that Vučić is serious about moving closer to the EU. Scholz wants to invite to a big conference in Berlin in the fall. In this way, the chancellor would like to get the “Berlin Process” back on track, which was once devised by his predecessor and is intended to encourage the Balkan states to work together on very practical matters. As an exercise, so to speak, for joining the EU, which should then become a reality. Scholz is now making it his business. Will “personally” work to ensure that “not sometime in the very distant future, but as soon as possible” the admission of the Western Balkan states becomes a reality. The chancellor is careful not to state a time, except that it will of course be “not possible in six months”.
“The accession negotiations that were promised two years ago must start now,” promises Scholz in Skopje
On Saturday morning in Skopje alongside the North Macedonian Prime Minister Dimitar Kovacevski, Scholz then becomes concrete. At the EU summit on June 23, the decision will be made as to whether accession negotiations with North Macedonia and Albania can begin after a long delay. The North Macedonians “worked very hard” and should finally be able to bring in the harvest, says Scholz. “The accession negotiations that were firmly promised two years ago must begin now. In any case, I will campaign for it,” he promises. In fact, the Macedonians have not only met all the criteria set by the EU for the start of negotiations, they have also changed their country name to North Macedonia, because Greece is registering the older rights to “Macedonia”.
“Here there was what is often missing in politics, namely political leadership and the willingness to take risks,” praises Scholz, who of course knows that the risk cost Kovacevski’s predecessor Zoran Zaev his job and then Greece, but could not soften French President Emmanuel Macron. Kovacevski decides to see Scholz’s visit as a “green light”, which, as everyone in North Macedonia knows, is not entirely true. Now it is Bulgaria, probably the last country to block the start of accession negotiations. An annoying circumstance that, after a half-hour flight over the mountains of the Balkans to Sofia, leads Scholz to a somewhat Byzantine-looking government building.
As bad luck would have it, the Bulgarian government is currently being shaken by a crisis and concessions on the issue of North Macedonia seem to cost Prime Minister Kiril Petkov his majority. Entertainer Slawi Trifonov’s populist ITN party has withdrawn its four ministers from the four-party government. The dispute is complicated, but at its core revolves around the question of how and when North Macedonia will enshrine the Bulgarians as a “constituent nation” in its constitution. Scholz does not seem to have brought any solution with him and has not heard any in Sofia either. In the press conference with Petkow, he wrestled through a “very, very cautious confidence” that “we’re making progress.” Shortly before the return flight to Berlin, it sounds as if Scholz had arrived in the Balkans.