Welcome to the Schengen area?
Bulgarian and Romanian hauliers complain of competitive disadvantages due to blockade. 13 years after the European Commission certified that Bulgaria and Romania meet the criteria to join the Schengen Agreement the two Balkan states will finally become a part of the Schengen area for sea and air traffic on 31 March. They’re still barred from the overland component, due to an ongoing Austrian veto. This has caused some problems, as ITJ correspondent Frank Stier reports.
Austria has some reservations concerning Bulgaria’s ability to protect the EU’s external borders against illegal immigrants. “Our position remains clear and unchanged,” chancellor Karl Nehammer tweeted on 9 March, after a visit to Romanian president Klaus Iohannis. “At present,” he said, “the Schengen system doesn’t seem to work, so it can’t be expanded.”
Many Bulgarians and Romanians feel disadvantaged by ongoing customs checks during car and train journeys. Even though they’re now set to be exempt from passport checks on flights within the EU, many still feel as if they’re being treated as second-class citizens of the EU.
Representatives of the freight transport industry in both countries have complained that their members are at a considerable competitive disadvantage in the internal market for road and rail transport.
According to the Union of Road Hauliers of Romania (UNTRR), waiting times for Romanian trucks at the border to Hungary usually come to 8 – 16 hours, last three days on public holidays and can reach five days in the worst periods.
Waiting times of 20 – 30 hours are normal for entry into Bulgaria; in summer the period rises to three days. UNTRR estimates that the overall economic damage caused by this ongoing Schengen blockade comes to EUR 19.1 billion for the period from 2012 to 2023.
“In 2023 alone, it resulted in losses of EUR 2.6 billion,” secretary general Radu Dinescu complained at a conference in Bucharest early in March.
Time is money – the losses since 2012
For Bulgaria, which is three times smaller in terms of population, Vassil Velev, the chairman of the Association of Industrial Capital in Bulgaria (AIKB), estimates that the economic damage caused by exclusion from the Schengen area comes to approximately EUR 0.5 billion per year. This, he’s convinced, reduces the attractiveness of the Balkan country for foreign investors and makes goods in the country more expensive.
In January he called on the national government to take a “tough stance”, for example by tightening controls on Austrian freight traffic in transit to Turkey, and appealed to Bulgarian consumers “not to buy Austrian products and not to use Austrian services.” There’s no indication that his call for a boycott has been heeded by any sections in the country.
Philippe Kupfer in contrast, Austria’s economic delegate in the Bulgarian capital Sofia, has received numerous complaints since early this year concerning Austrian trucks being harassed during customs clearance at Bulgaria’s borders. “The same also applies to vehicles of other nationalities carrying Austrian goods, or to wares destined for Austria,” he elaborated.
Pressure on Brussels from the Balkans
The EU Commission has declared its intention that Bulgaria and Romania should also join the Schengen area for overland journeys before the end of this year, but it can’t override Austria’s veto.
At the end of January three MEPs from Bulgaria, Romania and Greece therefore put an idea that has already been circulating for some time now up for discussion again as a potential alternative. Instead of acceding to the Schengen area for overland purposes their three home countries could create a kind of mini-Schengen or Balkan Schengen, in which mutual border controls would be abolished as early as this summer.
Adina Valean, EU commissioner for transport from Romania, immediately rejected such an idea. Although she is “aware of what delays at the borders mean for transport companies” and has “always campaigned for free movement”, it is “more important to think about the EU as a whole,” she warned.