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Politico (17 January 2022)

BY LILI BAYER AND ZOSIA WANAT

A move to put Poland’s EU ambassador in a top Brussels post has sparked a backlash among diplomats and officials, who fear the department dealing with the bloc’s neighbors becoming a bastion of illiberalism inside the European Commission.

Some Commission officials and EU diplomats say the appointment of Andrzej Sadoś as the top civil servant at the department, known as DG NEAR, would send the wrong message to countries in the Western(*) Balkans that aspire to join the Union and have been told by Brussels to adopt high democratic standards.

The European commissioner in charge of the department, Olivér Várhelyi of Hungary, has already faced accusations of downplaying democracy and the rule of law in assessments of Western Balkan countries that want to become EU members.

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(*) AVİM considers the term "Western Balkans" to be a politically motivated separatist terminology and persists on the use of the geographical and historical identification "Balkans" regarding the region.