"EU path not easy, Serbia needs reforms"

"EU path not easy, Serbia needs reforms"

At a panel discussion on the beginning of EU membership talks organised by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and the Global Progressive Forum, he said that Serbia has changed considerably since the beginning of the 1990s.

He said that major changes are visible in terms of the political class' stand on the issue of progress.

Swoboda said that during the talks in Belgrade he heard politicians discussing the future, which is a main prerequisite for progress on the EU path.

Swoboda, who also held office as the EP rapporteur for Croatia, noted that Zagreb's EU path was not easy either and the same applies to Serbia.

He underscored that reforms need to be carried out, including the further dialogue with Priština.

Swoboda called on the civil society to keep exerting pressure on political parties to make progress in the reform implementation.

Swoboda said that he would be pleased if the talks were to conclude in 2018, to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. The factors in the EU have their stands too, and I hope that egoistic stands will soon be overcome, Swoboda said.

Vice President of the Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the EP Lubor Roucek said that ten years after the major EU enlargement, many of the so-called old EU members feel enlargement fatigue.

Socialists and democrats in the EP and our member countries are keeping the vision of enlargement alive, Roucek said and noted that anti-European and xenophobic parties may win in the elections for the EP in certain countries.

The enlargement policy was one of the most successful ones in the history of European integration, Roucek said.

Member of the EU-Russia Parliamentary Cooperation Committee Knut Fleckenstein said that EU accession does not entail a need for Serbia to interrupt its connections with Russia.

He explained that the problem lies in the fact that EU citizens believe that the number of issues is rising with the increase of new members.

"We have created the problems ourselves and we need to see now how they can be solved," Fleckenstein said that unless the EU succeeds in solving the problems in the next seven or eight years when new members may be about to join the EU, then the Union will be in for a lot of hardships. He backed further EU enlargement process.