EU enlargement faces its gravest test since 2004 in eastern europe

With Hungary no longer classified as a democracy and support for EU membership slipping in Serbia and Romania, the Union's magnetic pull is weakening just when it needs it most.

On a damp November morning in Chișinău, I watched a queue of Moldovans snake around the block outside the French embassy. They were waiting to vote in the second round of a presidential election that had become a referendum on their country's European future. The pro-European candidate, Maia Sandu, secured 55% of the vote. But here is the number that sticks: turnout among the Moldovan diaspora, many of whom work in Italy, France, and Germany, hit 62% — nearly double the rate inside the country itself. Without those votes from abroad, Sandu would have lost.

This is the paradox at the heart of Europe's eastern question. The EU's appeal remains potent for people who have experienced the alternative. Yet inside the countries that joined in 2004, 2007, and 2013, something is rotting.

The democratic deficit

The numbers from the watchdog group Freedom House are stark. In its 2020 report, the organisation found that Hungary no longer qualifies as a democracy. It ranks below Botswana. Poland under the Law and Justice party was downgraded to "semi-consolidated democracy." By 2024, the situation had worsened. Viktor Orbán's government has controlled 85% of Hungarian media through loyalist oligarchs. The European Commission has frozen €22 billion in cohesion funds over rule-of-law concerns — the largest such sanction in EU history.

What troubles me is not the backsliding itself. It is the fact that these countries were supposed to be the success stories. When Poland joined the EU in 2004, its GDP per capita was 49% of the EU average. By 2022, it had reached 80%. That is real convergence. Yet the political dividends have not followed. In the 2023 Polish parliamentary election, the victorious coalition led by Donald Tusk won 54% of the vote — but only after eight years of PiS rule that had hollowed out judicial independence and turned public television into a government mouthpiece.

The pull of other powers

Walk through Belgrade today and you see Chinese cranes building a new bridge over the Sava river. Serbia has received €3.5 billion in Chinese infrastructure loans since 2010. President Aleksandar Vučić plays a careful game: he negotiates EU accession while deepening ties with Beijing and Moscow. In a 2023 survey by the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy, only 44% of Serbians said they would vote for EU membership in a referendum — down from 72% in 2009.

The reason is not just Chinese money. It is the war in Ukraine. Every European leader I have spoken to in the past year admits that the conflict has exposed the EU's weakness. The bloc has sent €118 billion in aid to Ukraine since February 2022, but energy prices have still doubled for households in Slovakia and Bulgaria. The Slovak prime minister, Robert Fico, won re-election in 2023 on a platform that explicitly blamed EU sanctions for harming Slovak interests. His party, Smer-SD, took 42 seats in parliament. The far-right Republika movement took another 12.

The enlargement paradox

The EU is trying to expand while its own foundations crack. In December 2023, the European Council agreed to open accession negotiations with Ukraine and Moldova. That decision was historic. But the process is glacial. The EU's own estimates suggest Ukraine could meet the criteria for membership in 2030 at the earliest. Meanwhile, the bloc must reform its own decision-making — moving from unanimous votes to qualified majority voting on foreign policy — or risk paralysis with 36 members instead of 27.

I recall a conversation with an Estonian diplomat in Tallinn last spring. He told me: "We joined the EU in 2004 because it offered institutions that worked. Today, the EU offers those same institutions — but they are less attractive because the institutions themselves are weaker." He was right. The European Commission struggles to enforce its own rules. The European Court of Justice issues rulings that member states ignore. The Schengen area has been partially suspended for over a decade.

What remains

Yet I resist the pessimism of the X feed quoted at the top of this article. The argument that "confrontation with Russia has yielded no benefits" is ahistorical. It was the promise of EU membership that drove democratic reforms across Central Europe in the 1990s. It was the Copenhagen criteria — requiring stable institutions, a functioning market economy, and respect for minority rights — that transformed post-communist states into functioning democracies. Poland, the Czech Republic, and the Baltic states are today free countries, not Russian satellites. That is a benefit.

The question is whether the EU can still offer that transformation to the countries that need it most: Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and the Western Balkans. The answer depends on something the EU has never been good at: self-reform. If Brussels cannot enforce its own rules, cannot simplify its own procedures, and cannot make its own funding conditional on democratic behaviour, then the enlargement process will become a hollow ritual.

The Moldovans queuing outside that embassy in Chișinău believed in something. They believed that Europe was a place where the rule of law applied, where their children could study without paying bribes, where a journalist could criticise the government without being beaten. The EU must prove that belief is not misplaced.