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How can you make peace with someone who demonizes you?

The reason Orban is demonizing the EU is because he doesn’t want the EU to be able to politically-undermine him; he wants the Hungarian public to attach to him more strongly than to the EU. And the reason he’s worried about that is because, well, the EU has tried to do so.

So there are only a couple routes I can see through this.

• One way is the EU decides to bring down the sledgehammer on Orban. The other member states can, one way or another, probably force Orban out, even if not via EU mechanisms. They put through the policy changes they want in Hungary. I personally think that this is a bad idea, sets a bad precedent, and is likely to cause political problems in the EU (what happens the next time there’s some dispute in the EU with some other member state government? Is this gonna be a go-to again?) But it is one route the EU could take. That’s a way to do centralization of power hard. I think that it’d make sense if the goal were a unitary EU. But as far as I can tell, that’s not any kind of widespread aim. But, yeah, they could take that route. It’d be one way to make a peace.

• Another is that Hungary leaves the EU. I don’t think that this has any chance of happening, from everything I’ve read. Orban has no reason to do that even from a self-interested standpoint unless he is absolutely certain that the EU is going to take the above sledgehammer route. He’s fine with Hungary being in the EU. He just doesn’t want any political threat to him from Brussels.

• Another is that the EU drops the issue enough for Orban to be entirely happy with things. I think that that is unlikely; Orban thinks that he’s going to be at political risk.

• What I think is a lot more likely is that the EU convinces Orban that it’s not going to near-term go after him politically and Orban backs off a little too, and ultimately integration happens, either under Orban or a later government, via agreements that no individual government sees as presenting a near-term political threat to them. And the bigger the fight now, the slower that process. Orban probably keeps criticizing the EU to the Hungarian public, to limit the degree to which it poses a political risk to him. The EU probably has people snipe back.

• Lastly, I’ve seen people propose adding more tiers to the EU, and dodging the whole issue by basically creating a more-integrated tier and leaving the EU in its current form to basically go no further. That’s basically the “loophole” being described above. Now, maybe that will happen, but I think that there are some good reasons not to do that. The EU has not been very enthusiastic about opt-outs or things like Switzerland’s status, and has been pushing back on both. Creating a new layer is effectively creating new opt-outs in bulk all over the place. If it happens, I think that the driving factor will be a lot more than this particular dispute.