Hungary’s Opposition Thwarts E.U. Plan to Increase Aid for Ukraine

The European Union has a population of around 450 million and one of the world’s biggest economies.So how is it that Hungary, a small country with only 10 million people and a lackluster economy blighted by high inflation, this past week steamrollered Europe’s plan to throw Ukraine a financial lifeline worth $52 billion?The Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, torpedoed the aid package, strongly supported by much bigger countries like Germany, France and Poland, by exploiting the power of veto held by each of 27 member states over key decisions relating to foreign and security policy and spending.The requirement for unanimity on important matters, designed to ensure that small countries have a voice, but which many see as a grave design flaw, means that no decision gets taken unless everyone is on board.Other European leaders have mostly shied away from threatening to use, never mind actually wielding, the veto. But Mr. Orban has embraced it as a disruptive weapon in his battles to shape policy and engage in what Daniel Freund, a German member of the European Parliament and critic of the Hungarian leader, described as a “constant game of extortion and blackmail.”On the eve of a summit meeting in Brussels on Thursday on Ukraine, the European Union’s executive arm released 10 billion euros, about $11 billion, in funding for Hungary that had been frozen over its violation of various E.U. rules. Officials said the timing was coincidental, but many saw it as a payoff. A further €17.6 billion remains frozen.After insisting in Brussels that he was not using his veto to extract money — “it’s not about a deal. We represent approaches and principles,” he said — Mr. Orban told Hungarian radio, “This is a great opportunity for Hungary to make clear that it must get all of what it is due.”There are growing concerns, however, that Mr. Orban wants to paralyze decision-making in pursuit of a broader ambition: upending the European Union in its current form and remaking it in Hungary’s image as a bastion against liberal values, immigrants and what he calls the “woke movement and gender ideology.” Hungary, he says, is a “counter model” that works.“The fear is that he actually wants to create chaos and disorder and destroy the E.U. from within,” said Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform, a research group in London. “He used to be more transactional, but people I talk to in Brussels say he has become more unreasonable, more truculent, more self-confident and more destructive.”At the same time, Mr. Orban has also become more isolated. The victory of centrist and liberal forces in a recent Polish general election ended the eight-year tenure of Law and Justice, a conservative nationalist party closely aligned with Mr. Orban in hostility to Brussels.