>companies have to pick poor countries to produce these thingsI'm not Hungarian but calling Hungary just a "poor country" feels a bit insulting. Yes it's not US or Germany wealthy, but by global standards of poverty it's quite wealthy and developed.
>Those tend to be the ex-Soviet countries with rather extremist governments.
1. Hungary was never soviet. The only Eastern-EU members who were part of the former USSR were Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, which are not very extremist (or at least I don't hear about them in the news).
2. Extremism in various shapes and forms, is on the steep rise in the last ~5 or so years, almost everywhere in Europe, including even the more wealthy, progressive and tolerant societies, due mostly to a combination of the following: blatant government corruption with no consequences for the ruling class, shit paying jobs unaffordable housing and ever growing wealth inequality condemning people to a life of serfdom and impoverished retirement, uncontrolled illegal migration, decaying quality of social services and benefits like healthcare and education despite the high taxation, etc.
Angry and unhappy people tend to vent their anger by voting for the anti-establishment extremists despite that being against their best interest: see Brexit also. This is by no means an exclusively Hungarian issue, it just gets parroted the most because Orban makes a good boogie-man for the EU media since he has no filters, but there are other less meme-able political extremists in the EU who don't get as much news time because they're a lot more careful with what they say in public, see Austrian politics.
3. If you consider Poland and Hungary to be "extremist", then what exactly are Turkey, India, Belarus, China, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, pre-2022 Russia, including Azerbaijan who's been busy waging a war in Nagorno-Karabakh using western arms and gas money, that's turning into a humanitarian disaster, that the west pretends it doesn't see. All some of the West's closest allies and biggest trading partners, and at the same time some of the worst offenders of human rights violations that make Poland and Hungary look like social and democratic paradises in comparison.