The meeting will be attended by the prime ministers of Albania and North Macedonia, Edi Rama and Christian Mickoski, as well as Serbia's President Aleksandar Vucic.
Rama is expected to request a second intergovernmental conference in October, to be followed by another one by the end of the year.
With the meeting, Von der Leyen wants to prove that in her new mandate she will pay special attention to this region and the EU enlargement process as a whole.
The main purpose of this meeting, however, is to discuss the "reform and growth programmes" that almost all countries in the Western Balkans region have submitted to the European Commission as a precondition for receiving the first payments from the Growth Plan for the Western Balkans, approved by the EU in May this year.
Von der Leyen has personally committed herself to promoting this plan, which has also been supported by the European Parliament and the member states in the EU Council.
Each country had to draw up a reform programme based on the preliminary recommendations of the EU bodies.
5 countries in the region have already done so. Bosnia and Herzegovina is the only one that, for domestic political reasons, has not yet done so - due to the upcoming local elections in the country, it is not expected to do so before October.
The expectation in the EU was that in mid-September the Commission would approve these programmes of the countries in the region. This was expected to happen before the meeting on 19 September, but the process has been postponed until October.
The beneficiaries of these funds are all countries in the region: Kosovo, Albania, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia.
The plan also aims to promote regional cooperation and the development of a common market in the region, which will gradually be integrated into the European Union's common market. | BGNES
