Ukraine candidate for EU membership? Armin Cuyvers on BNR
If it were up to Ursula von der Leyen, a positive opinion on Ukraine's application for membership would be forthcoming this Friday, 17 June.
She said this after her surprise visit to President Zelensky in Kyiv last weekend. A number of Member States see it differently, but what does the candidate status actually mean? What are the legal requirements for and consequences of candidate membership? And what exactly is Macron's plan to start a kind of European political community alongside the EU: can it be done legally and does it have any chance of success?
On Wednesday 15 June, Armin Cuyvers, Professor of European Law at Leiden Law School, spent an hour discussing these questions in the studio of Dutch BNR Nieuwsradio’s programme Europa. Other guests included Gijs de Vries, former Dutch secretary of state and former chairman of the group of the European Liberal Democrat and Reform Party in the European Parliament, now attached to the London School of Economics; and Wouter Zweers, a Research Fellow at the Clingendael Institute on EU enlargement policy. Listen to the podcast of the programme (in Dutch) here.