Strategic Policy Recommendations to Bolster EU Candidate Country Resilience until 2035

Countries seeking to join the European Union (“Candidate Countries”) are increasingly facing external pressures from authoritarian states. Their efforts to influence domestic politics include weakening Candidate Countries’ democratic safeguards, creating economic dependencies and exploiting security vulnerabilities – all of which could interfere with Candidate Countries’ democracies as well as their path to EU accession. Against this backdrop, EU enlargement policy must also work on building Candidate Countries’ resilience in the face of foreign malign influence, an additional challenge that will require dedicated attention and resources. 

This policy brief offers three forward-looking recommendations for the European Union, within the democratic, socio-economic and security realms. Together, they aim to strengthen Candidate Country resilience vis-à-vis foreign malign influence while deepening their long-term integration into EU structures. Rather than offering comprehensive solutions, the recommendations are designed as targeted additions to the EU enlargement toolkit. Additionally, they are crafted to be flexible enough to remain effective and relevant under a wide range of future conditions. 

The recommendations were developed through a strategic foresight and policy design process within the REUNIR project. They draw on REUNIR’s scenarios, resilience assessments and a policy-gap analysis, and were refined in an in-person workshop in January 2026 with 12 experts from the project’s consortium member institutions.

During the workshop, participants first developed policy options for the three relevant realms. They then carried out several robustness checks, including a ​‘pre-mortem’ exercise, where participants identified different ways in which a policy option could fail/​succeed in the future, and a scenario-based ​‘wind tunneling’ exercise that stress tested policy options against multiple foresight scenarios REUNIR had developed. By building on and extending the strategic policy design workshop method originally designed by Asena Baykal and colleagues, the policy recommendations seek to be anticipatory, preventative, ambitious but realistic, targeted but robust, and an addition (not ​‘more of the same’). 

The Three Recommendations

Recommendation 1 (democratic domain): The European Commission, in cooperation with the European Economic and Social Committee, should establish an ​‘EU + Candidate Country Civic Council’ as a formal channel between EU institutions and civil society to strengthen democratic oversight in the accession process and protect civic space. 

Recommendation 2 (socio-economic domain): The European Commission should reduce state-capture risks in Candidate Countries by structurally integrating countries into EU innovation ecosystems, thereby accelerating high-value economic diversification through competitive funding, common standards and cross-border partnerships. 

Recommendation 3 (security domain): The European External Action Service, under the leadership of the High Representative/Vice-President, should create an EU+ security forum with Candidate Countries. This would help strengthen resilience against external shocks, deepen practical security cooperation during the accession process and lay the groundwork for stronger security assurances over time.

This study was originally published by REUNIR.