Hungary – forever a pain in the EU’s backside and currently holding the rotating presidency of the EU Council – is set to lose out on its share of EU funds. Again.

Viktor Orban has lost a battle with the European Union (Image: Getty)

This time it is for refusing to pay a fine imposed by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) over the thorny subject of migration, with the EU executive – the EU Commission – actioning a special procedure to deduct €200m which the court imposed over the country’s long-standing restrictions on the right to asylum.

Brussels used its financial muscle on Budapest before, not least withholding funds over alleged rule of law violations, and even threatening earlier this year to screw up the Hungarian economy if the country didn’t play nice over Ukraine.

Yet, undeterred, the central European state – led by EU bête noire, nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán – already missed the first deadline to pay up in August, which led to a second request dated this Tuesday.

Since this second request was also ignored, the Commission said on Wednesday it would activate the so-called “offsetting procedure” to subtract the €200m fine from Hungary’s allocated share of the EU budget.

So far as Orbán is concerned however, his country is in fact owed money by Brussels for helping to defend the EU’s borders from undocumented immigrants, something the EU utterly rejects.

This all comes as both Hungary and Poland – another country on the more conservative side of the EU’s cultural Iron Curtain – refuse to sign up to a latest burden-sharing EU-wide migration pact.

This, despite the fact Polish PM Donald Tusk is very much an EU favourite. Indeed Tusk’s government has quickly reconciled to the demands of a Polish public still hostile to mass immigration by allowing its border guards to continue aggressively defending Poland’s border against migration weaponised by next-door Belarus.

For its part, Hungary also faces a €1m fine for each day it continues ignoring the ECJ ruling and maintains restrictions on asylum rights, which the ECJ described as an “unprecedented and exceptionally serious breach of EU law.”

The danger for the EU however is that Hungary increasingly has less need of EU cash, set as it is to become a net contributor to the EU’s coffers. This is especially so if – as Orbán’s critics allege – Hungary retains uniquely cordial ties with China and Russia.

Put simply, the EU’s financial weaponry has less potency than it used to. Little wonder Budapest feels confident enough not only to refuse to pay up but to emulate the actions of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and bus migrants to Belgium, just as the Republican shifted migrants to Democrat-voting areas.

In the end, Orbán – like EU blue eyed boy Tusk – is also responding to the demands of a population which stubbornly refuses to sign up to EU norms on mass migration and political correctness.

But while Brussels caved in on withholding funds to Warsaw – again over alleged rule of law abuses under the previous Right-wing government – simply due to Tusk’s good word, on Hungary the long-running saga may continue, but EU threats are losing their potency as Budapest reconciles itself to reduced EU funds, amid ongoing hostility between the two sides.

Both sides should instead accept the other will not back down. Even if Hungary was subject to something of a bait-and-switch with the EU – believing it was signing up to a free trade bloc and ending up in a glorified political union, albeit one without genuine democratic representation – it has been a member of the club long enough to know the house rules won’t be changed.

The EU, however, should also appreciate that huffing and puffing, and financial blackmail, is losing its potency against a country reconciled to less EU cash, while finding new sources of funding, and which actually represents the opinions of the majority of its citizens on this most contentious of subjects, however much Brussels may chafe at the idea.

Hungarians – like Poles – don’t want to end up like Britain, France and Germany, but prefer to be European versions of Japan and Korea, even if – like those countries – low fertility rates coupled with restricted migration compounds labour shortages. Little wonder Orbán is on a mission to boost native fertility rates, with quite considerable success one should add.

This is a battle the EU will lose, even if Hungary ought to realise it cannot win in the sense of getting the EU to devolve back into a looser union of sovereign states either. This unhappy marriage between Brussels and Budapest – and the eastern and western halves of the EU more broadly – is in need of an amicable separation before things really come to blows.