The European Commission will most likely conditionally recommend the granting of candidate status for Bosnia and Herzegovina, several Brussels sources confirmed for Radio Free Europe (RFE).

The European Enlargement Commissioner, Oliver Varhelyi, will unveil the enlargement package together with individual annual reports for each country on Wednesday, October 12.

The number of conditions that will be attached to the recommendation will be “significant”, these sources say, explaining that these conditions will be mainly related to the 14 priorities that the European Commission presented in 2019, in its opinion on BiH's readiness to become a candidate country.

That year, the European Commission only came out with the priorities that BiH needs to fulfil in order to start the process of accession negotiations and did not come out with an explicit recommendation for candidate status.

Namely, Bosnia has a relatively negative report from the European Commission this year. According to the document that the RFE has access to, the European Commission concluded that BiH has not made any progress in key fields.

The poor rating in the annual report is the reason why some commissioners were against recommending candidate status for BiH.