Several major crises and challenges throughout Europe, and in particular Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans, have the potential to either disrupt or to drive EU accession processes. Geopolitical conflicts such as the war in Ukraine, mass protest movements against domestic corruption such as those in Serbia and Bulgaria, and more general continent-wide challenges such as inflation and immigration pressures may drive public preferences about the optimal paths for EU integration, that is, the best ways for candidate countries to achieve the economic, political, and administrative criteria for EU accession. This article uses original survey data to analyze respondent preferences for policies and developments that would be most constructive to EU accession processes for candidate states, in two steps. Firstly, we use data from three of the six candidate countries currently undergoing accession negotiations (Albania, Serbia, and Ukraine) to analyze the relationship between local respondents’ perceptions of both ongoing crises and foreign and domestic actors, and their preferences for how to advance the accession process. With data forthcoming in the autumn of 2026, we expect to find that respondents prioritize policies and developments targeted at the actors and crises that they perceive to be the most problematic, such as external threats to sovereignty, corruption among domestic politicians, insufficiencies in EU support, or economic downturns. In the second step, we compare the optimal policies and developments according to respondents from these candidate countries with EU respondents’ preferences for which changes are most important before each of the candidates should be allowed to join. In this step we expect both domestic differences within EU member states and within candidate countries, and differences between countries in the distribution of policy preferences, due to factors such as EU membership, length of membership, region, etc. We expect this to highlight a lack of common goals and interests, which must be addressed with awareness of the particular policies and developments that may create the optimal conditions for integration.
