Aleksandar Vucic and Olaf Scholz (Photo: The General Secretariat of the President of the Republic/Dimitrije Goll)
Olaf Scholz will be visiting the Western Balkans for the first time as German chancellor to solve frozen disputes and the main purpose of his mini-tour is solving the stalemate caused by political blockades, Deutsche Welle reported on June 9.
Deutsche Welle said that Germany's chancellor had announced that he would visit Kosovo and Serbia back at the start of May, during separate talks in Berlin with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Kosovo Premier Albin Kurti, adding that the visit had turned into an extended mission directed at solving bilateral problems that stood in the way of EU enlargement to the Western Balkans.
In addition to Serbia and Kosovo, the German chancellor will visit North Macedonia and Bulgaria whose dispute is also slowing down the process of Brussels' expansion to the region. He will also attend a South-East European Cooperation Process (SEECP) summit in Thessaloniki during his two-day tour on June 10-11.
The first stop on Scholz's snap tour which begins on early on June 10 is Kosovo, where he will tour German KFOR soldiers after which he will leave for Belgrade "where it seems that the process that started a long time before Vucic's and Scholz's first official meeting, has intensified in the past several days." This process consists of preparations by the Serbian state leadership for compromises which Belgrade will be forced to make if it wants to continue its path toward the EU, DW said.
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