"Incredibly welcome. This should have been done a long time ago," says Sweden's Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard (M) about the start of negotiations taking place in Luxembourg this evening.
For now, only the first so-called negotiation cluster is open, covering basic EU requirements regarding, among other things, democracy, fundamental rights and freedoms, and the legal system.
Sweden wants to get the other five clusters up and running quickly. However, Malmer Stenergard is more skeptical of the proposals made by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz to offer a kind of “trial membership” for the time being.
"It must never be a substitute for true EU membership," says the Foreign Minister.
