After months of blaming the European Union for all the ills, Mr Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban takes over on Monday its rotating presidency, while finding himself more isolated than ever because of his position on the war in Ukraine.

The longest-serving leader of the European coalition has lately hardened his rhetoric against “of the technocratic elite of Brussels”, saying that he is “wracking his head how to hurt her”.

“It’s like a defendant on trial suddenly finding himself in the prosecutor’s shoes,” sums up Paul Ladveauthor of a book about Viktor Orbán, and speaks of a “completely absurd” situation.

“The two sides are playing the game that the institutions want. Fortunately, the match is not of decisive importance”, he comments on it AFP, asking “not to overestimate the importance” of this presidency.

According to him, Budapest will continue to block key issues and “try to loosen restrictions” on the rule of law to recover its money.

Because the differences are many and billions of euros in funds have been frozen due to concerns about corruption and repeated blows to democracy in this central European country.

In matters of geopolitics too, the discord is complete.

Unlike his partners, Orbán supports him former US President Donald Trump, from which he borrowed the slogan of the next six months – “Make Europe Great Again”.

He is close to Chinese leader Xi Jinping while also cultivating relations with the Kremlin and refusing to support Kiev militarily.

He was nevertheless a young liberal when, aged 26, he rose to fame by defying the communist regime in Budapest with a fiery pro-freedom speech in June 1989, during a tribute to the victims of the 1956 uprising against the Red Army.

Co-founder a year earlier of Alliance of Young Democrats (Fidesz)becomes the symbol of her ambition Hungary to break free from totalitarianism and adopt Western values.

Today, however, Viktor Orban he denounces “the decline of the West” in the face of the “LGBTQI+ lobby” and the influx of immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, whom he often describes as potential “terrorists”.

This is the culmination of a long march to the extreme right.

Prime Minister in 1998 at the age of just 35, he is forced to leave power four years later, defeated in the polls by the socialists. When he returns to government in 2010, he decides to consolidate his power so that he will never again suffer what he had experienced as a humiliation.

Re-elected comfortably in every parliamentary election since then, this father of five claims to implement an “illiberal democracy”.

“During the last 14 years, Mr Orban aligned with Putin’s ideology of a West in complete chaos” and reining in opposition forces, Stefano Bottoni, an Italo-Hungarian historian at the University of Florence, analyzes for AFP.

It is in light of this development that we must “understand his position” on the Russian attack on Ukraine, he says. If one listens to the 61-year-old leader, it is not so much Moscowas the NATO and the EU which caused a “global conflagration”.

It is a position that increasingly irritates his allies. “He doesn’t realize at what point it is toxic,” the expert estimates, because “for numerous countries, the war in Ukraine is the most important issue at the moment for the redefinition of Europe.”

Even within the extreme right, this leads “to a strategic impasse”, adds Buttons. He had promised to “occupy Brussels” and be “a regulator. In the end, it falls into the third category.”

At rift for years with his conservative partners of the European People’s Party (EPP) in the European ParliamentFidesz is struggling to find a new political group.

Weakened internationally, he is also challenged by the emergence of a new challenger, the conservative Peter Magyar, a pure product of the Orbán system turned dissident.

But it doesn’t matter, she says Andrea Peto, Central European University (CEU) analyst: bad news “never reaches the ears of his voters”, who are inundated with propaganda, she argues.

Viktor Orbán, a football fan and the scion of a poor family, has only one goal, according to the researcher: “to maintain, together with his close circle of oligarchs, control” over the country.