All I see in the news is Hungary being a thorn in the side of the EU. Why can’t they just kick Hungary out of the EU?
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There is no mechanism for that in the EU’s charter or bylaws. The presumption when the legal framework of the EU was put together was that a strongman country in a position like Hungary would naturally want to fracture with the union, which was the original purpose of article 5. They did not anticipate that such a country would deliberately stay within the union to cause problems at the behest of an external superpower.
Edit to add: And, to be clear, changing the charter to include such a mechanism would be a very hairy thing to get passed in any form that could actually be used against Hungary. One of the core tensions of the EU is that basically everyone in it wants to also be seen as an independent sovereign state, so any forceful removal mechanism would have to either have incredibly high bars to clear (direct territorial aggression against another neighbor, for example) or be so vaguely-worded it would be unenforceable and probably un-passable as other fringe nations object to a threat to their EU status.
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