People have this idea about some glorified past of homogeneous nation states when that's a fairly recent political invention that was imposed by political elites on the majority who, as you said, had a pretty wide array of dialects, languages, and customs. That engineered homogeneity then gets treated as sacrosanct and primordial.
I don't see how that makes sense, if anything the Americas are a lot more homogeneous when compared to European states. Drive the distance equivalent to one mid-sized US state in Europe and you're driving through multiple countries with radically different languages and customs and histories who all intermingle now more than ever. But in the New World there's basically three languages spoken at the official level(English, Spanish, Portuguese) and two main religions(Catholicism and Protestantism) across two continents encompassing over a billion people. There's ethnic diversity sure but that's the case in Europe as well, even Hungary has Romani and German minorities across its cities and over here that diversity tends to get melted over time. We used to have big German and Nordic minorities but all assimilated into the dominant Anglo culture.
And to the extent there are homogeneous places in Europe its usually something that was engineered in the last two hundred years(forced conformity, population transfers, ethnic cleansing etc).
By global standards he's not terrible but by EU standards he's pretty low tier. Basically he used EU grant money to enrich his cronies who then bought out most of the media and newspapers in the country and turned them into propaganda outlets for the ruling party. So elections are not as competitive and open when compared to the traditional mature democracies in the region.
He also explicitly cited Erdogan's Turkey and Putin's Russia as models for his vision of illiberal democracy. So yeah if he's praising dictators and saying he wants his country to be like theirs while actively working to make elections less competitive, he's going to come off as a dictator or at least an aspiring one.
By global standards he's not that bad. But the thing is he's not judged merely by global standards, he's judged by EU standards. And by those standards, calling for an end to race mixing is quite egregious. Nobody really cares if some tinpot dictator like Sisi does stuff that's a hundred times worse because Egypt is not in the EU.
