EU chief Charles Michel met Prime Minister Viktor Orban Monday in a bid to ease rising tensions, with the increasingly belligerent Hungarian leader threatening to block key decisions on Ukraine.
Orban -- the only EU leader who has maintained close ties to the Kremlin -- is threatening to use his veto at an EU summit in December to block aid to his war-torn neighbour and stop Ukraine's bid to join the bloc.
The Hungarian leader is at loggerheads with Brussels on a whole array of issues, ranging from migration, judicial reform and LGBTQ rights to Ukraine.
His latest salvo is an aggressive eurosceptic advertising campaign featuring posters targeting European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
While some analysts describe Orban's Ukraine move as simple blackmail to unlock billions of euros in frozen EU funds, others argue that he is trying to mobilise voters against "Brussels bureaucrats" ahead of EU Parliament elections in June.
Last week Brussels authorised a 900-million-euro ($980-million) advance to Hungary from its Covid pandemic recovery fund.
But the bulk of the money that Budapest was due to get has been suspended until it meets several rule-of-law conditions which the EU says it has been flouting.
Brussels has also frozen 22 billion euros in separate cohesion funds.
Orban told his supporters earlier this month that Hungary was resisting EU policies "with all its might", claiming they would lead Europe "to its ruin".
"As the election campaign approaches, the government wants to showcase issues it intends to change in Brussels," political scientist Daniel Deak of the pro-Orban 21st Century Institute told AFP.
But Bulcsu Hunyadi, of the Political Capital think-tank, said Orban needs these "symbolic battles against external enemies" to "keep his base constantly mobilised".
In a similar vein, the nationalist has also recently toughened his stance against the LGBTQ community under pressure from the far-right Our Homeland party.
Ahead of the last European elections in 2019, Orban launched a similar campaign against von der Leyen's predecessor Jean-Claude Juncker.
He has continually portrayed EU leaders as puppets of Jewish billionaire George Soros -- and now his son Alex -- a bete-noire of Orban's due to their support of human rights NGOs.
"This is an old tactic aimed at creating a vague and imaginary threat to distract voters from real issues, such as the quality of public education or the healthcare system," a spokeswoman for Soros' Open Society Foundations told AFP.
Von der Leyen, meanwhile, is "completely unfazed" by the posters targeting her in Hungary, according to the European Commission.
"We have learned to live with Orban's barking" his "howls into the microphone" before changing his attitude in the EU council chamber, said a European diplomat.
"The challenge is to reach out and not further escalate at a very critical time of negotiations on issues that require unanimity," the diplomat added.
But the EU is making a mistake by not being tough with Orban, Hunyadi said.
"Orban is an excellent tactician, who has no choice but to bend to EU rules for the time being, because he is rather isolated, while playing a dangerous game," he claimed.
The "illiberal democracy" he claims to have built in Hungary is incompatible with the bloc's values, Hunyadi argued, saying Orban is presenting himself as an example for other far-right leaders.
