Victor Orban is a fascist and he's spent the last 13 years seeking to turn Hungary into a fascist state. He controls the judiciary. He controls the media. He scapegoats Jews, Muslims and refugees for the country's problems. He aligns himself with Putin.

Fascists inherently don't like cross-border cooperation and supranational governance - it runs against all their beliefs about their nation's superiority. So he doesn't like the EU either and blames it for things to his domestic audiences. There is no press freedom in Hungary and so Hungarian voters get bombarded with this nonsense.

The EU needs to recognise that an enemy of European civilisation has been given the keys to the castle. That is a dangerous situation. It is time to invoke Article 7 to recognise that Hungary is acting against the EU's founding values, and remove Hungary's veto.

Orban is in my opinion very good at gaslighting both the EU and his domestic supporters. He talks shit about the EU at every possible opportunity, but then when he shows up for Council meetings in Brussels, he'll usually sign up for whatever he's asked that month. Then he goes back to Hungary and immediately tells voters that he gave the EU leadership hell and that he got a great deal for Hungary. This is mostly my opinion, but I think everyone in the EU expects this conduct from Orban, and they just go along with it for the sake of progress.

His voters on the other hand genuinely think that he's a national hero for standing up to the no good, despicable, very bad EU leftist bureaucrats who also just happen to subsidise their economy. I kind of admire his batshit approach to politics, but disagree with everything he says. Basically, he's all bark and no bite. Just ignore whatever mad shit he's spouting and assume he's saying it for the benefit of his deranged supporters and won't follow through on it.

Orban sucks off Putin like the GOP and Heritage Foundation. He's trying to melt the EU from within. What more do you need to know?

Their only play is money. Everything else is secondary. All money from the EU is funneled to Hungarian companies controlled by Orban's cronies, so they always get their (large) share.

At the same time they build up a very solid media control (made easier because Hungarian is an isolated language -the next related one would be finnish- and foreign language skills (apart from Russian) are low for most of the rural population at least) alongside some typical voter manipulation (where others want to get rid of FTP-voting he introduced it, so classical US-style gerrymandering is possible). And those people get fed anti-EU narratives 24/7 and believe most of that bullshit to reelect Orban time and time again.

So you basically have this wannabe-dictator that spends most of his time loudly complaining about the EU for his brain-washed domestic audience, while behind closed doors he will then agree to basically every EU compromise as long as is comes with more EU money and let's him save face as the strong and independent guy fighting the evil EU...

Isn't another part of the problem is how rural the population is? With a population of 9m, only 1.7m live in Budapest, and the second biggest city is only 200k. The rural population only consumes Hungarian propaganda and doesn't get any other perspective.

https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2019-04/european-union-hungary-democracy-viktor-orban-english