This paper acts as follow-up to a Policy Analysis published in May 2024, which aimed to provide a comprehensive illustration of the EU’s enlargement prospects ahead of the 2024 EU elections, and the risks and challenges thereafter. This new iteration aims to offer a complete view after the elections, exploring its short-to-medium-term outcomes and providing a set of recommendations for EU and Kosovo institutions to cooperatively address Europe’s enlargement challenges.

Following an introduction to the topic, Section 2 provides an up-to-date picture of the EU’s new institutional cycle as of early 2025, as well as a status check on the EU’s enlargement policy—with a focus on the Western Balkans, and on Kosovo in particular. It also maps out the instances of institutional renewal that will directly impact Kosovo in the realms of its EU membership bid and its dialogue with Serbia, and touches upon what can be expected in the short-to-medium run. Section 3 provides a three-legged analysis on the new composition of the EP following the June 2024 elections: firstly, it explores the ideological reconfiguration of the chamber in terms of its eight political groups; it then goes on to discuss how the new cross-party balance can impact the EP’s positioning around EU enlargement to the Western Balkans; last, it traces a preliminary reading of the new EU policy cycle focusing on the case of Kosovo. Section 4 revisits the three post-election scenarios for Kosovo—a best-case, a status quo, and a worst-case—that were mapped in the previous paper, illustrating three divergent paths for the country’s accession prospects. It then discusses the extent to which each of the scenarios has been fulfilled. The paper’s final conclusions and a set of policy recommendations are outlined in Section 5.