Karl Nehammer's Austria is starting to feel pressure in Europe regarding the Schengen Area strategy, and this is because a new official announcement that came yesterday directly from Sofia shows that Bulgaria should meet the Netherlands' conditions by the autumn in order to be allowed to join Schengen together with Romania.
Austria opposed not only Romania for Schengen accession, but also Bulgaria, seconded by the Netherlands, but although our country fulfills the technical conditions for accession, the Bulgarians will not fulfill them until the fall, and the maintenance of the veto by Karl Nehammer's government could prove to be a much more difficult mission.
Austria could remain alone in its stubbornness not to allow the expansion of the Schengen Area to include Romania and Bulgaria, a situation that will most likely not be easy for the government in Vienna, but everything depends on the Bulgarians' ability to fulfill their promises to solve the problems of meeting the technical accession criteria.
"We managed to develop a paradigm together with the Netherlands for how our efforts should continue from here on out. We need to work together to identify everything that the Netherlands expects to see in a future report on the rule of law in Bulgaria.
When I say October, it's not a target date, because it's not just up to us, it's a deadline by which we could cover the requirements to be part of Schengen. The goal here is not to save each other individually, the goal is to go to Schengen together because our interests are common."
