Hungary

A group of armed Hungarian revolutionaries pose for the camera. These young people, who had known no other regime than the communist one, were fighting in a national uprising against Soviet domination in October 1956. For a few weeks they appeared to be successful, but when Russian planes bombed Budapest and Red Army tanks moved in, the revolution collapsed.

Magyar traditional costume, Transylvania, Romania. Transylvania was formerly part of Hungary but was ceded to Romania in 1920 by the Treaty of Triannon. Hungary finally renounced its claims on the area in 1996.

Country in central Europe, bounded north by the Slovak Republic, northeast by Ukraine, east by Romania, south by Serbia and Croatia, and west by Austria and Slovenia.

Government

Under the terms of the ‘transitional constitution’ adopted in October 1989, Hungary is a unitary state with a one-chamber, 386-member legislature, the national assembly (Orszaggyules). Its members are elected for four-year terms under a mixed system of proportional and direct representation: 176 are directly elected (on a potential two-ballot run-off basis) from local constituencies; 152 are taken from regional, county, and metropolitan lists on a proportional basis; and 58 are elected indirectly from party-nominated national ‘compensation’ lists designed to favour smaller parties. Free competition is allowed in these elections. The national assembly elects a president as head of state and chief executive for a maximum of two five-year terms, and a council of ministers (cabinet) headed by a prime minister. Since 1989 opposition parties have been able to register freely and receive partial state funding. A constitutional court has also been appointed to serve as a watchdog.

History
For the history of Hungary before 1918, see Hungary: history to 1918.

Kun's soviet republic

Nationalist discontent and the Austro-Hungarian defeat in World War I led, in the autumn of 1918, to the break-up of Hungary, leaving only a rump state – two-fifths of former Hungary – in the hands of the Magyars (ethnic Hungarians). In October 1918 revolution broke out in Hungary. Count Mihály Károlyi became head of government and Hungary was declared an independent republic.

Karolyi was appointed president in January 1919, but he handed over to a communist soviet republic, headed by Béla Kun, in March 1919. Kun's forces waged war on Czechoslovakia, with some success, and on Romania, which defeated the Hungarian soviet republic, and the Romanian army occupied Budapest in August.

Admiral Horthy comes to power

The Romanian army did not leave until mid-November 1919, and after that Admiral Horthy, heading a counter-revolutionary army, restored order by exercising ‘White terror’ in the countryside. Elections were held in January 1920 and the National Assembly restored the kingdom under Horthy as regent. Two attempts at restoring ex-King Charles (Karl Franz Josef) in 1921 proved abortive.

The early years of Horthy's regime marked an improvement in Hungary's economic position, and, despite the political repression, there was an attempt at limited land reform. But the political and economic power remained in the hands of a small reactionary clique around the regent, a clique in which the large landed and business interests were supreme. Horthy remained the real ruler of Hungary until 1944.

Hungarian expansionism

The revision of the Treaty of Trianon, by which in 1920 Hungary lost three-fifths of its former territory and two-thirds of its population, became the overriding aim of Hungarian policy. Without such a revision Hungary could never aspire to a dominant position in the Danube Basin, which it still coveted under the governments of Count István Bethlen (1921–31) and of Gyula Gömbös (1932–36).

Mussolini, the Fascist dictator of Italy, openly sympathized with these territorial aspirations because they seemed to involve the disruption of Yugoslavia, which had acquired Hungary's Balkan possessions, and also territory claimed by Italy. The Rome Protocols signed in 1934 between Italy, Hungary, and Austria offered a show of resistance to the nascent menace of Nazi Germany.

However, even before the German annexation of Austria (March 1938) had made the now enlarged and formidable Germany an immediate neighbour of both Italy and Hungary, both those countries had decided to compromise with Germany in the hope that together they might appear sufficiently strong to secure some advantages. In November 1938 Hungary obtained part of Slovakia and Ruthenia under the first ‘Vienna Award’; it obtained the rest of Ruthenia in March 1939.

Hungary enters World War II

Hungary joined the Anti-Comintern Pact of Germany, Japan, and Italy in February 1939. Yet when World War II began Hungary remained neutral until June 1941 when, following the German invasion, it declared war on the USSR, claiming that this action was inspired by crusading motives suggested by the Anti-Comintern Pact and divorced from any territorial ambitions.

Soon two-thirds of the Hungarian army – an army built up with the connivance of Hitler in defiance of the Trianon Treaty – was destroyed on the battlefields of Eastern Europe. Though Hungary also obtained land from Romania and from Yugoslavia as a result of its German alliance, it was soon obvious that it had in fact sacrificed its own independence in return for the paper fulfilment of its irredentist ambitions.

By 1941 Hungary had become a mere satellite of Germany. In December 1941 it was forced into declaring war on Britain and the USA. Throughout the war, Horthy made repeated and largely futile efforts to modify the frequent German demands on Hungary. The defection of Romania from the Axis in August 1944 led to a strong movement in Hungary for coming to terms with the Allies, but the announcement that the USSR had promised Transylvania to Romania was a sufficient inducement to the Hungarians to continue the war.

The defeat of Hungary

A few days later Soviet and Romanian troops crossed the Romanian frontier into Hungary. In October 1944 they crossed the River Tisza, taken Szeged, advanced to within 100 km/60 mi of Budapest, and also taken Debrecen. Horthy asked for an armistice, but was promptly deposed by a group of Hungarian Nazis, and fled the country. The Germans installed a puppet government headed by Ference Szálasi of the far-right Arrow Cross movement.

One Soviet army was approaching Budapest from the east in November 1944 while another army, advancing up the Danube from the direction of Yugoslavia, reached Lake Balaton early in December, and soon the Red Army was surrounding the capital. Later in the month Gen Miklos was appointed premier by a provisional National Assembly at Debrecen, already under Soviet occupation, and his government declared its readiness to conclude an armistice with the USSR and the other countries with which Hungary was at war, and to declare war on Germany.

German resistance in Budapest, however, continued until mid-February 1945, by which time a large part of the city had been reduced to ruins. By early April the Germans had been driven out of Hungary, and with them went the Nazi puppet government, while that of Miklos now became the effective government for the whole of Hungary.

In Moscow on 20 January 1945, the provisional national government of Miklos concluded an armistice with the Allies by which Hungary undertook to withdraw its troops within the frontiers of Hungary as they had existed at the end of 1937. It also agreed to pay reparations totalling an equivalent of $300 million to the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. The Vienna Arbitration Awards of 1938 and 1940, assigning northern Transylvania to Hungary, were declared null and void.

The beginning of Soviet domination

In March 1945 the Miklos government, which included the communist agriculture minister Imre Nagy, brought into operation a land reform bill, involving confiscation of all large estates, and the redistribution of land to the peasants. In August a Soviet–Hungarian trade agreement was signed providing for a reciprocal exchange of Hungarian goods and for extensive Soviet participation in the control of Hungarian industry, production, communications, and banking. The privileges thereby conferred on the USSR provoked a protest from Britain and the USA, and the ratification of the agreement was deferred by the Hungarian Assembly.

In the subsequent elections, the Smallholders' Party obtained an overwhelming majority, and Zoltán Tildy, its leader, became prime minister. Tildy's government issued a decree expelling from Hungary all German-speaking residents, numbering 500,000, in addition to the Germans, numbering about 250,000, previously ordered to leave. An elected assembly inaugurated a republic in 1946, with Tildy as president, but it soon fell under Soviet domination, although only 70 Communists had been returned out of a total of 409 deputies.

Hungary lost more than two-thirds of its national wealth in the war and emerged badly devastated and with a great burden of reparations (of which two-thirds were due to the USSR and the remaining one-third in equal shares to Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia). In fulfilment of the commercial agreement of August 1945 with the Soviet Union, joint Soviet–Hungarian companies were founded for the exploitation of Hungarian bauxite deposits and oil fields. The two greatest sources of Hungary's national wealth were thus put under direct Soviet control and management. Following the inter-Allied Potsdam Conference of July–August 1945 all shares in Hungarian undertakings that were in German hands were transferred into Soviet possession. This factor placed the USSR in the position of directing the management of many Hungarian industrial undertakings.

The Communists seize power

In February 1947 the Communists, with Soviet connivance, carried out a coup d'état that destroyed the effective power of the Smallholders' Party and made themselves supreme, though the semblance of Western democracy was retained for a little while longer. In March 1947 the USA sent a note of protest to the Soviet chairman of the Allied Control Commission for Hungary against Soviet interference with the non-Communist government of Hungary. The peace treaty with the Allies was ratified by the Hungarian National Assembly in July 1947 and by President Tildy in August 1947. The Soviet occupation troops were then officially withdrawn, only an unspecified number of communications units officially remaining.

Another general election took place in August 1947, in which the avowed Communists gained only 22% of the total votes. The real power, however, was already in their hands, and there followed a rapid elimination of liberal and social-democratic elements, and an increasing orientation of Hungary towards the USSR in both domestic and foreign affairs. In August 1948 Tildy resigned the presidency.

In February 1949 the Communists absorbed the remnants of the Smallholders' Party, and of various moderate left-wing groups, in a ‘People's Independent Front’, which, after winning the elections in May, adopted in August a new constitution that made Hungary a ‘republic of workers and working peasants’ after the Soviet model. British and US protests that the Hungarian government had broken the peace treaty of 1947 by its denial of the freedoms and human rights that it had agreed to secure were to no effect.

Rákosi's Stalinist regime

A Stalinist regime was imposed under Communist Party leader Matyas Rákosi, who emerged as dictator after his potential rival L Rajk had been condemned to death and hanged on trumped up charges. Post-war reconstruction was carried out on Communist lines: industry was nationalized and attempts were made to organize agriculture on Soviet lines. In addition, a wave of secret-police terror was launched.

The non-Communist post-war governments had already tackled the basic question of land reform and redistribution, and this was carried further by the Communists. In 1950 a five-year plan designed ‘to transform Hungary from an agrarian industrial country into an industrial agrarian country’ was put into operation, but it fell short of its original target.

By 1949 the state had nationalized the Catholic schools and dispossessed the clergy of 400,000 ha/100,000 acres, granting the church only about 11,000 ha/27,000 acres. In 1950, 59 Catholic orders with more than 10,000 members were dissolved and their property confiscated by the state, and in 1959 a new law gave the state the right to appoint its own nominees to bishoprics not filled within 90 days of falling vacant.

In February 1949 the trial was held before a ‘people's court’ of Cardinal József Mindszenty, archbishop of Esztergom and prince primate of Hungary, and a long-standing opponent of communism, on charges of disloyalty to the state and ‘anti-democratic’ activities, followed by conviction and a sentence of life imprisonment and confiscation of all property. The trial aroused the strongest protests in Western Europe and the USA.

The Hungarian national uprising

Popular discontent was widespread, and the country's economic position most unstable. In July 1953 Imre Nagy became premier in place of Rakosi, and his policies were more moderate than that of his predecessor. With the support of Soviet premier Georgi Malenkov, Nagy introduced some measure of economic liberalization. After the fall of Malenkov, in April 1955 Nagy was replaced by the more hardline Hegedus. In 1956, in the wake of Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in his ‘secret speech’, pressure for democratization mounted, and Rákosi stepped down as Communist Party leader.

In October 1956 popular discontent in Hungary reacted suddenly and violently to the example set by Poland, which had achieved peacefully almost overnight some measure of independence from the USSR. A huge crowd in Budapest demanded the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary and the return to power of Nagy, who had been readmitted to the Hungarian Communist Party ten days earlier. Nagy was appointed premier, and János Kádár was appointed general secretary of the Communist Party, now renamed as the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (HSWP).

Nagy lifted restrictions on the formation of political parties, and in October he reformed his government, including non-Communists in it, and promised that there would indeed be a Soviet withdrawal. Soon after this Cardinal Mindszenty returned, a free man, to Budapest. In November the government announced plans for Hungary to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and become a neutral power. These changes were, however, opposed by Kádár, who set up a counter-government in eastern Hungary.

The anti-Soviet rising in Budapest had been followed by spontaneous national risings in many other parts of Hungary. It was a rising in which young people of all classes, of a generation that had known no other government except the communist one, were predominant. Bitterness and violence on both sides were extreme. At first it seemed that the revolution would succeed. The Soviet Union appeared to be withdrawing from Hungary, and the Hungarians had themselves effectively disposed of most of their own pro-Soviet fellow citizens, in particular those in the hated secret police.

The crushing of the uprising

The very success of the revolt sealed its ultimate fate; for though they might have been prepared to make minor concessions, the Soviet Union was not prepared to see one of its satellites throw off all vestiges of communist government.

Taking advantage of the fact that the world's attention was distracted by the Suez Crisis in the Middle East, Soviet forces advanced to crush the rebels. In November Budapest was heavily bombed by Soviet planes, and Nagy was replaced as premier by Kadar. Nagy himself took refuge in the Yugoslav embassy, but was subsequently abducted from there by Soviet agents. In June 1958 it was announced that he had been executed for ‘high treason’.

Within a few days the Hungarian revolt was over, utterly crushed by the Soviet armies. Some 200,000 refugees poured across the frontiers into Austria and Yugoslavia, to be given asylum in various countries in Western Europe and in the USA. Cardinal Mindszenty sought refuge in the US embassy. The Kadar government acted ruthlessly to suppress all traces of revolt, and during 1957–58 many of the alleged leaders of the rebellion were brought to trial and sentenced to death or to long periods of imprisonment.

While the uprising was still in progress the UN Security Council condemned Soviet intervention in Hungary, but this was vetoed by the USSR. The General Assembly of the UN called on the USSR to withdraw its troops from Hungary, but this was disregarded. The USSR maintained that it had been invited by the Hungarian government to assist in suppressing a reactionary rising.

Liberalization under Kadar

From 1960 onwards there was increasing liberalization in Hungary. Many political prisoners were freed under an amnesty in 1962, and several Catholic Church leaders were also released. Some relaxation in the application of Marxist theory to agriculture and industry gave both peasants and industrial workers greater individual rights, while the managerial and professional classes were awarded privileges on merit, rather than being tied to active participation in Communist politics. Living standards rose. Hungary's economic position remained precarious, but increasing numbers of tourists from the West helped to strengthen its international balances. A number of those who had fled from Hungary in 1956 returned.

Kadar, who, starting as a Soviet puppet, had successfully engineered the transformation from bloody repression to relatively liberal communism, relinquished the premiership of Hungary in June 1965, but retained the secretaryship of the HSWP, and therefore the real control of Hungarian affairs. Hungary became the spearhead of economic reform in the Eastern bloc. The ‘new economic mechanism’, in which concessions were made to a market economy, was introduced in January 1968. Intellectual freedom also grew considerably in Hungary in the 1960s, although not after 1968 (the year of the crushing of the Prague Spring). The transformation had been accomplished without lessening Hungary's close ties with the Soviet Union.

A new primate of Hungary, Monsignor László Lekai, was appointed in February 1976, the Vatican's right to make decisions about the Hungarian church thus being acknowledged by the communist government. Hungary remained, however, a loyal member of the Warsaw Pact and Comecon.

Reform in the post-Brezhnev era

Hungary's relations with the USSR significantly improved following the death of the conservative Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, in 1982, with Hungary's ‘market socialism’ experiment influencing Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika programme. Further reforms introduced in 1987–88 included additional price deregulation, the establishment of ‘enterprise councils’, the introduction of value-added tax (VAT), and the creation of a stock market.

As elsewhere in Eastern Europe, change came quickly to Hungary from 1988. Kádár, who had become an obstacle to reform, was replaced as general secretary of the ruling HSWP by Károly Grósz in 1988, and was appointed to a new post, that of party president. Two radical reformers, Rezso Nyers and Imre Pozsgay, were brought into the Politburo.

The Hungarian Democratic Forum was formed in September 1988 as an umbrella movement for opposition groups, and several dozen other political parties were formed 1989–90. A period of far-reaching political reform followed, in which the rights to demonstrate freely and to form rival political parties and trade unions were ceded. The official verdict on the 1956 events was revised radically, with Nagy being posthumously rehabilitated.

In May 1989 the border with Austria was opened, with adverse effects for East Germany as thousands of East Germans escaped to the West through Hungary. Two months later Grósz was forced to cede power to the more radical reformist troika of Nyers (party president), Pozsgay, and Miklos Nemeth (prime minister from November 1988), who joined Grósz in a new four-person ruling presidium.

Constitutional changes

In October 1989 a series of constitutional changes, the result of round-table talks held through the summer, were approved by the national assembly. These included the adoption of a new set of electoral rules, the banning of workplace HSWP cells, and the change of the country's name from ‘People's Republic’ to simply ‘Republic’. Also in October the HSWP changed its name to the Magyar Szocialista Párt (MSzP; Hungarian Socialist Party), and adopted Poszgay as its presidential candidate. Conservatives, including Grósz, refused to play an active role in the new party, which had become essentially a social-democratic party committed to multiparty democracy. Despite these changes, the MSzP's standing was seriously damaged in the ‘Danubegate’ scandal of January 1990, when it was revealed that the secret police had bugged opposition parties and passed the information obtained to the MSzP.

In May 1990 Árpád Göncz, an opponent of communism, became acting president, until August 1990 when he formally took office.

Transition to a market economy

As a major step in the privatization programme, begun in 1987, a stock exchange was opened in Budapest in 1990. In January 1991 the forint was devalued by 15% in an effort to boost exports. A Compensation Bill for owners of land and property expropriated under the communist regime was approved by the National Assembly in June 1991 in an effort to stimulate the privatization programme and inward foreign investment. Gross national product fell by 7% in 1991, industrial production fell by one-fifth during the first half of 1991, and by the close of 1991 unemployment rose to more than 7%. However, of all the former communist European states, Hungary experienced the smoothest transition towards a market economy. This was credited to the establishment of self-management and privatization before the downfall of the communist regime in 1989.

Foreign relations

In February 1990 talks were held with the USSR about the withdrawal of Soviet troops stationed in Hungary. In June 1990 the Hungarian government announced the end of any participation in Warsaw Pact military exercises. The Pact and Comecon were disbanded by July 1991, enabling the country to move towards the West more directly.

Hungary joined the Council of Europe in November 1990. The last Soviet troops left Hungary, on schedule, in June 1991. In December 1991 Hungary signed a ten-year association agreement with the European Community (EC; later the European Union), and in June 1993 the EC formally invited the country to apply for membership. In 1994 Hungary joined NATO's ‘partnership for peace’ programme as a prelude to full membership of the alliance.

In March 1996 a friendship treaty with the Slovak Republic was signed, and Hungary became a member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). A Treaty of Cooperation with Romania, signed in September 1996, renounced any claim by Hungary to territory in Transylvania, while Romania agreed to guarantee rights to its large ethnic Hungarian minority.

Ex-communists take the lead

Prime Minister Jozsef Antall died in December 1993 and was succeeded by former interior minister Peter Boross of the Magyar Demokrata Fórum (MDF; Hungarian Democratic Forum). The May 1994 assembly elections showed a sharp swing to the left, with the MSzP emerging victorious from the first round and its pragmatic leader, Gyula Horn, becoming prime minister. Despite holding an absolute majority in parliament, the MSzP formed a coalition government with the centrist Szabad Demokraták Szövetsége (SzDSz; Alliance of Free Democrats) in July 1994, and pledged to maintain a pro-Western, market-centred reform course. A radical economic-reform package, unveiled in March 1995, advocated major cuts in public spending to reduce the level of indebtedness, devaluation of the forint to boost exports, and a speeding up of privatization.

Support for right wing increased

Despite winning most votes in the first round and engineering an export- and foreign-investment-led economic recovery during their four years in office, the MSzP finished with fewer seats than the right-of-centre Fidesz, after the second round of voting in the May 1998 parliamentary elections. The MSzP won 32% of the first-round vote (against 33% in 1994), but support for their coalition partners, the SzDSz, slumped to 8% (from 20% in 1994). Fidesz, led by the 35-year-old Viktor Orbán, a populist, won 28% of the first-round vote and 148 of the parliament's 386 seats, while the Socialists won 134. Fidesz formed a coalition with the rural Független Kisgazda, Földmunkás és Polgári Párt (FKgP; Independent Smallholders Party), which won 48 seats. The nationalist Magyar Iqazsáq és Elet Pártja (MIEP, Hungarian Justice and Life Party), led by Istvan Csurka, won 14 seats, its first ever. Orbán became prime minister and little change was expected in the country's free-market economic policy.

In September 1998 László Kovács, a former foreign minister, became leader of the MSzP, succeeding former prime minister Gyula Horn.

Relations with the West

In November 1997, 85% of participants in a referendum voted in favour of joining NATO, though turnout was low, and in December the EU decided to open membership talks with Hungary. Full EU membership negotiations commenced in 1998. In 1999, Hungary officially became a member of NATO, along with Poland and the Czech Republic.

Ferenc Mádl was elected president in June 2000, after three months of elections, and assumed office the following month. In April 2002 the coalition of the MSzP and the SzDSz won an absolute majority – 198 of the 386 seats – in parliamentary elections, although Fidesz and its coalition partner the MDF remained the largest party, and Prime Minister Orbán was re-elected.

Hungary became a member of the EU on 1 May 2004, with a 2003 referendum finding 84% of the population to be in favour of accession.

Leadership changes

In May 2002, Socialist Peter Medgyessy became prime minister, at the head of a coalition government. Medgyessy resigned after falling out with his coalition partners, and was succeeded by former sports minister Ferenc Gyurcsany.

In 2005, the Socialists ran into further problems with their coalition partners, who blocked their presidential candidate, and parliament instead chose László Sólyom as the next president.

Hungary (redirected from Hungery)