Post-pandemic recovery and enlargement to the Western Balkans are among the main challenges for the European Union "in the coming period," Slovenian Prime Minister, Janez Jansa, was quoted as saying by Croatian state agency Hina on Tuesday. 

“If the EU does not expand, somebody else will,” Jansa told Slovenian diplomats ahead of the beginning of his country’s six-month presidency of the EU, which starts on 1 July.

For Slovenia, which will host an informal EU-Western Balkans summit in early October, this topic is particularly important because of the proximity of the Western Balkans, and EU enlargement should be a response to strategic and security challenges posed by third actors.

“Among them is Turkey, which with its Balkan policies is trying to halt EU enlargement,” said Jansa.

As regards the coronavirus pandemic, Jansa, said that “the globalist idea about obtaining on the global market, at a lower price, what you cannot secure in your own country, had proven illusory,” Croatian state agency Hina quoted him as saying.

“No country in the world was ready for the pandemic, as evidenced by the lack of protective and medical equipment,” he said.

As for resilience and recovery programmes, Jansa said that EU member-states “had relatively successfully agreed on a comprehensive economic-financial package but that it would be much more difficult to reach agreement on transition to the green economy.”

“The EU has 27 members with different structures of national economies and a lot will depend on how successful the European Commission will be in addressing specific problems in individual countries,” he said.