What is galling is how openly Prime Minister Viktor Orban does it, blaming the European Union for every imagined indignity or interference in Hungary’s affairs, while milking billions from Brussels to enrich his cronies and prop up his illiberal rule. He is not alone, as a Times investigation of the bloc’s lavish farm subsidies demonstrates in shocking detail — the governments of several formerly Communist Eastern European states have also cynically taken advantage of the union’s largess through opaque deals, feeding a new class of land barons.

Perhaps even more galling is that the European Union knows all this, but prefers not to see or hear about the corruption for fear of upsetting the precarious bonds that hold the union together. One of the cardinal rules of the bloc is to defer to national leaders as much as possible to avoid just the sort of charges of infringing on national sovereignty that populist leaders across Europe, and Brexiteers in Britain, are so fond of making.

Yet the Common Agricultural Policy, a mainstay of the union from its founding, is the biggest item in its central budget, accounting for about 40 percent of expenditures, or about $65 billion. Its mechanisms and focus have been regularly challenged and altered, but the fundamental notion of protecting the rural way of life has remained at its heart.

Without effective oversight, however, the funds allotted to the bloc’s newest members — all provided by European taxpayers — have often become a lavish slush fund for political insiders, helping them amass wealth and consolidate power. The examples cited in the Times study are appalling — in the Czech Republic, the prime minister, Andrej Babis, is a billionaire whose companies collected at least $42 million in agricultural subsidies last year. In Bulgaria, the Academy of Science has found that 100 entities collect three-quarters of the main type of the union’s agricultural subsidies. In Slovakia, the top prosecutor has acknowledged the existence of an “agricultural Mafia,” and a journalist investigating the infiltration of the farm industry by Italian mobsters was murdered last year.