Hungary on the Way to Democracy

...One of the miracles of thecurrent Hungarian political scene was the establishment last March of "trilateral" negotiations among the HSWP, the opposition and a host of "public organizations...

...The Nagy funeral gave new impetus to pressures within the Party for a change in command...

...It similarly offered the leaders of the HSWP's reform wing, Prime Minister Miklós Németh, Minister of State Imre Pozsgay and Speaker of the National Assembly Mâtyâs Szürös, a chance to break publicly with Party conservatives and to distance themselves from Kâdâr's legacy...

...The regime's internal difficulties are compounded by Hungary's ongoing and increasingly shrill disputes with Romania, Czechoslovakia and East Germany...

...General Secretary Kâroly Grosz' remaining allies in the apparat, the police and the Army found themselves suddenly faced with choosing between retirement or the search for new patrons...

...The economy is in deep trouble...

...Only about half the number of people who showed up for Nagy's reburial were present on July 14 to pay their last respects to the father of Hungary's $18 billion failed experiment in goulash Communism...

...The ultimate question is how far the regime can retreat without ceding the remainder of its power and forfeiting its future influence in Hungarian politics...

...Public opinion polls are suggestive, but inconclusive...

...At the same time, there remain deepseated fears about the reversibility of so far uninstitutionalized changes that have been initiated since May 1988, when Kâdâr was dropped from the Politburo...

...The Old Guard and its Communist critics simply cannot coexist...

...Of the three groups at the trilateral talks, then, it is the Communists who will have to yield...

...The charge is well-founded, particularly in the light of a recent statement by the National Association of Entrepreneurs promising financial assistance to 50-75 "pro-reform" (read "pro-business") candidates in the elections to the National Assembly...

...And because they are eager to produce a comprehensive reform package by early October, they are not in a position to coerce either the ORT or the "third side" to back off from their public stands...

...The central apparat is on the run, and its chances of stacking the delegations to the Party Congress scheduled to open October 6 are diminishing with each passing day...

...The television audience, likewise, was considerably smaller than for the June ceremony, according to one survey...

...Such pressure could produce a nationwide strike, orworse...

...Nagy's rehabilitation by the Party that sent him and four of his associates to the gallows 31 years earlier provided Hungary's new and reborn political parties with a prime opportunity to deliver their message before a crowd of 250,000 and a national TV audience...

...The opposition eulogies were a mixture of the solemn, the maudlin and the provocative, while the Party reformers settled for the role of silent witnesses at the historic morality play unfolding in Heroes' Square...

...The National Assembly by-elections this summer were marked by low turnouts, and participation in the general elections planned for next spring is not expected to exceed 60 per cent...

...Also unlike Poland, where the formation of a postelection government was facilitated by two fellow-traveling parties deserting the regime, the groups that might play a corresponding role in Hungary are not political parties but three former "transmission belt" mass organizations (the Patriotic People's Front, the official Trade Union Federation and the HSWP'syouth auxiliary, the Democratic Youth League...

...The corrective steps taken to date—structural changes, deregulation, liquidation of enterprises in the red, subsidies for production and consumption—have resulted in 17-plus per cent inflation and failed to make a dent in an unemployment rate of 3 per cent (not insignificant in a Communist country...

...Among HSWP members, by contrast, Kâdâr's burial was decidedly more popular: 48 per cent of the Party saw it on television...

...Voter apathy is a matter of serious concern to both the regime and its opponents...

...Hungary On the Way to Democracy BY RUDOLF L. Tokés Budapest For Hungarians this summer has been a brief pause between the year-long disintegration of the Jânos Kâdâr regime, which finally collapsed in June, and the much anticipated advent of a multiparty political system...

...The reburial on June 16 of Imre Nagy, leader of the 1956 revolt against the Soviet Union, followed by Kâdâr's funeral a month later, symbolized the passing of a generation of Hungarian Communists...

...The centrists thus appeared to have recovered from their June reverses...

...Finally, while the Catholic Church is a critical behind-the-scenes factor in Poland, organized religion has no influence on the Hungarian discussions...

...To a lesser degree, the military and the police are as well...

...In any case, Pozsgay and Németh both look upon the impending succession in the Hungarian Party primarily as an opportunity for a much overdue generational change...

...They favor the privatization of existing industry, the encouragement of private enterprise and the promotion of a predominantly market economy...

...What is more, their frontman, Pozsgay (now dubbed the Party's "human face"), was nominated as the HSWP candidate for the newly created post of President of the Republic...

...Readers of political tea leaves in Budapest are betting on the high profile Pozsgay ally, Minister of Foreign Affairs Gyula Horn, as the next Secretary General, and a young two-fisted reformer as his deputy...

...A threetiered structure consisting of a plenary session, two middle-level committees and 12 working groups, this "parallel parliament" involves over 350 negotiators, alternates, "good will facilitators,' experts, and resource persons from a total of 16 organizations...

...As the Party Congress showdown with the HSWP's conservatives approaches, Pozsgay, Németh and Nyers—despite their own competition—clearly have a common interest in the success of the trilateral negotiations...

...The one-time Social Democrat and economic reformer Nyers became Party chairman and Grosz was demoted to manager of Party administration under the Presidium's authority...

...In the short run, interestingly, it was not the reform wing but Nyers and, to a lesser extent, Grosz who profited from the shakeup...

...At the moment, there is a better than even chance that this transformation will be peaceful...

...Of the eight clusters of pallbearers it listed, the first was described as his "closest co-workers and comrades-in-arms...

...The new opposition and interest groups, though still lacking a unified strategy, are poised for the impending confrontation with the hastily retreating Old Guard...

...They speak of renaming the Party "Socialist" or "Democratic Socialist...

...Over the summer, the participants dispensed with the uncontroversial components of about a dozen legislative items, but they are now deadlocked on many gut issues, all with vital bearing on the future shape of Hungarian politics...

...It thereupon walked out, accusing the regime and the ORT of making deals over the heads, and at the expense of, the average workingman...

...They were Kâdâr's card-playing and hunting cronies, and the most crucial guarantors of his power over the past three decades...

...In scores of local and regional HSWP organizations around the country, insurgent activists of the Party's new Reform Circles, now numbering 250, have been voting out the incumbents...

...In late August, the "third side" Trade Union Federation was denied the right to field candidates in the next national elections...

...As Imre Pozsgay told me during a daylong conversation at the end of August, if the reformers' views do not prevail at the October Congress a split into at least two parties will be virtually unavoidable...

...The subjects of continuing debate include the new constitution and office of President, electoral and Party laws, access to the media, a new constitutional court, party financing, and the withdrawal of Communist organizations from the workplace, the Army and the police...

...A power struggle at the top and open contestation among its conservative, centrist and radical reform wings have caused disaffection and even panic among the rank and file...

...The closing sentence of Kâdâr's revealing last interview captures the prevailing spirit: "Imre Nagy's tragedy was my personal tragedy too...

...Whereas in Poland a single mass organization, Solidarity, represented the opposition, in Hungary theOpposition Round Table (ORT) is made up of no less than eight parties and quasi-parties...

...They indicate a sullen yet moderately hopeful electorate yearning for leaders with a sense of purpose...

...After months of preliminary skirmishing, substantive talks commenced in mid-June when Pozsgay replaced Grosz as the Communists' chief negotiator...

...Aside from their deep distrust of the HSWP, the views of Hungary's "silent majority" are difficult to fathom...

...But neither the opposition nor the Young Turks successfully capitalized on the event...

...35 per cent viewed the tribute to Nagy...

...But its result, in six to nine months, could be quite different from what has taken place in Poland since the dramatic days of the Parliament election in early June...

...Both stole the limelight as principal hosts during the subsequent visit of President George Bush, as the Hungarian representatives at the Warsaw Treaty Organization summit in Bucharest, and as the Party's spokesmen in Moscow at the end of July...

...These bodies constitute the "third side" in the trilateral process...

...And it is obvious that Prime Minister Németh is reluctant to implement austerity measures that could severely damage whatever electoral support the Communists— either in a united or divided form—might garner in the next elections...

...One issue that two of the participants— the HSWP and the ORT—agree on concerns the electoral status of the mass organizations...

...If the two can agree on a division of powers between them, a competent leadership might emerge from the ruins of the HSWP after all before the year is out...

...The situation indicates policy paralysis at the top and ideologically motivated sabotage at all levels of implementation...

...Under these circumstances, Imre Pozsgay, the Communists' only genuinely popular politician, may have no alternative but to take over the Party in October...

...The Party consented shortly thereafter to a review by all three sides of the government's entire reform program...

...The Soviet Union might come to view these conflicts as evidence of poor crisis management on the part of the HSWP and a source of unacceptable instability in Eastern Europe...

...The ruling Hungarian Socialist Workers Party (HSWP) is in disarray, its organizational coherence largely dissolved and its political will sapped...

...Each was a hero in the eyes of his followers—the first a patriot who died for his country, the second a survivor who coped with his conscience as best he could...

...Nyers' inept campaign speech on behalf of the Communist candidate in the June by-election in Kecskemet, a Pozsgay stronghold, actually lost votes (the man came in a distant third...

...The government, on the other hand, can no longer buy time by paying lip service to necessary economic reforms...

...Foreign policy grandstanding, however, proved to be of no help in marshaling centrist support in the countryside...

...In the process the trilateral forum has become a de facto replacement for the National Assemby fraudulently elected in 1985, as well as the scene of deal-making and alliance formation for the electoral campaign and beyond...

...Although they had the courage to come, they lacked the power to push aside the Kâdârist holdovers from the Central Committee...

...The USSR's fears of a security threat would surely increase, moreover, should Soviet conscripts stationed in Hungary start defecting to Austria through this country's thinly guarded western borders...

...This put the reformers in at least nominal control...

...The Party could still "escape forward" by adopting a program of radical changes at its Congress next month...

...In the last year and a half it has witnessed the defection of over 20 per cent of its members...

...Even the National Assembly and the State bureaucracy, especially the judiciary, are beginning to demonstrate a new autonomy...

...If he does not, or cannot, he will have to find a team capable of cleaning up the HSWP's Augean stables and steering it through the elections as a coherent organization...

...Pozsgay and his followers have characterized the events of October 1956 as a "popular uprising...

...Attentive readers of the following morning's edition of the HSWP daily Népszabadság could at last discover the truth about Jânos Kâdâr...

...The dialogue was prompted by the example of the Polish round-table talks...

...Rudolf L. Tokés, a previous NL contributor, is a professor of political science at the University of Connecticut...

...Meanwhile, the vacuum caused by" the HSWP's collapse is gradually being filled by an informal alliance of the various forces of liberalization...

...Explicitly condemnatory of the Kâdâr era, they seek to do away with democratic centralism, and to remold the Party into a loosely structured electoral machine that will gain legitimacy solely through the ballot box...

...These intimates turned out to be retired Stalinists and faceless thugs from the Workers' Guard, the secret police and the military...

...The outcome, announced at the June 23-24 Central Committee meeting, was a complete restructuring of the leadership into a four-man Presidium (made up of Rezsô Nyers, Pozsgay, Németh, and Grosz), an Executive Committee and a very lame-duck Central Committee...