BRUSSELS — The European Union traditionally ends its summer slumber in the dying days of August with an informal meeting of its foreign affairs ministers in a political equivalent of a fireside chat. But with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Hungary holding the presidency of the 27-nation bloc, vacation has already been turned into one long firebrand’s shout.
Since July 1, and right up to year’s end, the EU’s arcane rules allow Hungary, a nation of 9.5 million, to represent and often speak for the bloc of 450 million. The problem is that Orbán increasingly stands for everything the EU opposes.
The first two months of the half-year rotating presidency has already turned into “troll diplomacy,” said Péter Krekó of the Center for European Policy Analysis. Orbán “just wants to provoke more anger from the leaders of the European Union,” he said.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin is the EU’s archenemy because of his war in Ukraine, Orbán travels to Moscow and hobnobs with the autocratic leader. When China is increasingly considered the EU’s “systemic rival,” Orbán travels to Beijing to make friends and boost Hungarian business interests. When the EU embraced U.S. President Joe Biden after four especially acrimonious years with Donald Trump, Orbán makes a special detour to Mar-a-Lago to visit his trusted political ally.
And all this since taking on the EU presidency only eight weeks ago. To rub it into the faces of the bloc’s 26 other leaders, he made the motto of his tenure “Make Europe Great Again,” a take on Trump’s famous credo.
In a sign of increasing displeasure with Orbán, the EU has decided to take Thursday’s prestigious meeting of foreign ministers away from Budapest and hold it instead at its headquarters in Brussels. Some member states have already downgraded attendance to other meetings in Hungary, sending bureaucrats instead of ministers with more such initiatives likely to follow, officials said.
Taking tough action is extremely difficult since a slew of EU decisions need unanimity, giving lone disgruntled holdouts massive sway in the bloc. Having such a recalcitrant member in charge of the presidency makes it even tougher.
In the halls of the EU institutions from the parliament to the executive European Commission, every day officials are on the lookout for what Orbán might do next to discredit the bloc until the end of the year.
EU bodies have accused Orbán for years of dismantling democratic institutions and violating their hallowed standards on the rule of law. Orbán counters that the EU is seeking to abolish the principles of the nation state and impose a multicultural society aimed at undermining the continent’s Christian vestiges.
Knowing that Orbán’s turn at the helm was coming, EU nations sought to take as many decisions as possible under the preceding presidency of Belgium, including on key tranches of Ukraine aid after Orbán had questioned such help on several occasions.
There were initiatives in the European Parliament to deny Hungary the presidency altogether, but they failed as too complicated and drastic. Since retaking power in 2010, Orbán has thrived on criticism like that of liberal Renew group’s president Valery Hayer, who has called his stint a “rogue presidency” and his actions on Ukraine “a security threat.”
Unlike Britain, whose bellicose belligerence over the years eventually led it to leave the bloc, Hungary, long a net recipient of billions in EU funds meant to help the nation thrive in the wake of its communist past, has no such plans.
“In Brussels we are not passive, but we have set up shop there: we are not moving out, but moving in,” Orbán told a summer camp in Hungary, convinced that a groundswell of Europe’s populist far-right and his version of “illiberal” democracy will continue to surge.
Experts say that it is Hungary’s EU membership that makes him valuable to nations like Russia and China, offering a foot in the door of the massive bloc they would not have if Orbán chose to leave the community he loathes.
“Being the middleman who can fix certain issues, both for China, for Russia, for whoever is interested in influencing European politics, is the way he presents himself,” said Marija Golubeva, a former Latvian interior minister and political scientist.
For Krekó, it is a situation where each one uses the other for their own purposes. “I would absolutely agree that what Orbán does is usually serving the interests of Russia and China, but it serves his own interests as well — Orbán wants to weaken the European Union from within.”
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Associated Press writer Justin Spike in Budapest contributed to this report.