Serbia will not join the European Union before Albania, even though Belgrade has been designated a front-runner in the race for membership, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama said.

The European Commission has declared in recent months that it is open once again to the prospect of taking in new members from the Western Balkans. Brussels' change of tone followed a period of "enlargement fatigue," during which the EU was consumed with internal crises and faced a backlash in Western Europe over immigration from newer member countries in the east.

But EU officials have begun making the case that expanding into the Western Balkans will improve the bloc's stability and security, by establishing EU standards of democracy and rule of law in a volatile region torn apart by war in the 1990s. The Commission has designated Serbia, the most populous country in the Western Balkans, and its smaller neighbor Montenegro as front-runners in the accession process. It has said both nations, which are already in the midst of membership negotiations, could join the EU by 2025.

Albania and Macedonia both hope to get the green light to begin membership talks of their own in the coming months. The two countries anticipate that the Commission will declare in April that they have met the conditions to get started. It will then be up to the European Council of national leaders to decide in June whether to give the go-ahead.

"Serbia has to go through the painful process of recognizing Kosovo or at least [solving] the Kosovo problem" — Albanian PM Edi Rama

"We strongly believe the Commission report should be positive," Rama told POLITICO during a visit to Brussels to press his country's case. "For the Council, it’s a fight down to the last second because we need to convince everyone that there is only one right thing to do."

Albanian diplomats say they have identified France and Germany, the EU's biggest powers, and the Netherlands, whose Prime Minister Mark Rutte has voiced skepticism about enlargement, as the countries they need to get on board to get a positive Council decision.

Although Serbia has a considerable head start, Rama predicted it would not join the EU before his country — largely because Belgrade will have to resolve the highly sensitive issue of its relations with Kosovo, which declared independence from Serbia in 2008.

“Serbia will not become a member of the EU before Albania. This is something we know for sure,” he said.

"Serbia has to go through the painful process of recognizing Kosovo or at least [solving] the Kosovo problem," Rama said. "I strongly believe some magic has to happen — which will not happen — so that they get into the EU before us."

Although relations between Belgrade and Tirana have improved markedly in recent years, tension and rivalry between the two countries remain.

Serbia and Albania were on opposite sides of the 1998-1999 Kosovo war, when guerrillas from the territory's ethnic Albanian majority fought to end Serb rule. Belgrade continues to regard Kosovo as a rebel province of Serbia while Tirana has forged close relations with Pristina. Rama suggested last month that Albania and Kosovo could even have a joint president.

Long road ahead

In the interview in Brussels on Tuesday, Rama said Albania was in some ways further ahead on the road to EU membership than Serbia or Montenegro because it had undertaken a major reform of its justice system, designed to root out widespread corruption. Implementing the reform was a condition for Tirana to start EU membership talks.

"We have done exactly what we were asked to do so this process should be fair and should be predictable and should be merit-based," Rama said.

Although the EU's new Western Balkans strategy, published last month, offers warm words about the region's place in Europe, it is also blunt about how far away the six would-be members — Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia — are from joining the bloc. It says all of them have "links with organized crime and corruption at all levels of government."

Rama acknowledged his country had to deal with these problems. But he also pushed back against stereotypes he said were often applied to countries that aspire to join the EU.

"When Bulgarians wanted to enter, they were the country that tried to kill the pope. It was everywhere. Romanians were the country that were somehow guilty for having made Europe discover prostitution. We now have to deal with this notion of a special thing in our DNA connected to crime,” he said.

“For the sake of safety and security, Europe needs the Balkans in. This is clear. The last refugee crisis showed it very, very bluntly" — Albanian PM Edi Rama

He argued EU leaders should not shy away from enlargement out of fear that it may strengthen populists in their home countries. Expanding into the Balkans is in their own national interests, he said.

"For the sake of safety and security, Europe needs the Balkans in. This is clear. The last refugee crisis showed it very, very bluntly. The Balkan corridor was fundamental," he said. "Imagine if the countries in the Balkans are not the European playground but are others’ playground, whoever they might be.”

An artist and former national team basketball player who is friendly with Tony Blair, Rama has built a reputation abroad as a center-left pragmatist and been the subject of flattering Western media profiles. But critics accuse him of not doing enough to separate politics from the control of oligarchs — and of denigrating the work of journalists in a country where reporters face serious threats for investigating organized crime and corruption.

A report by the NGOs Reporters Without Borders and the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network released last week said "the denigration of the media features often in Rama’s rhetoric."

Rama denied he called journalists "garbage bins" and "public enemies" — among other insults — at an impromptu press conference last October. He said he had only been critical of the work of some media outlets. "What I use in general … we have a Turkish word which is very appropriate in my view … it’s the Albanian version of ‘fake news,’ which is ‘waste bin,’” he said. Albanian journalists say Rama's derogatory comments were clearly directed at reporters and could undermine public confidence in their work.

Cynthia Kroet contributed reporting.