The Orbán System Without Brussels

Orbán is the world's most effective welfare-state dissident living off someone else's welfare state. EU structural funds — roughly four to five percent of Hungarian GDP annually — financed the patronage networks, infrastructure projects, and media acquisitions that form the backbone of his political machine. Without that money, the system cannot be bought, and without buying loyalty, it does not hold.

EU membership also provided credibility. Investors and bond markets tolerated what they would have punished in a non-member state. Outside the EU, Hungary looks more like Serbia than like itself — and Serbia cannot afford patient, decade-long institution-dismantling. Economic fragility destabilises; it does not enable.

The uncomfortable conclusion is that Brussels was not merely Orbán's adversary. It was his precondition.