Hungary's Hazy Future

...Soon, however, poor coordination, apparat resistance and apathy among the rankand-file sapped the effectiveness of the group, leaving it incapable of rallying the support it needed to become the dominant force at the October Congress...

...Although accord was reached on six draft bills that were then summarily adopted by the liberal National Assembly, nine controversial items remained unsettled, including the future status of the Workers' Guard, a 60,000-man militia...

...Nyers got a pledge that the RA would not precipitate a walkout or open split at the gathering, as well as endorsement for the chairmanship of the new party...

...Members of the middle-level apparat took the hint—over 160 signed up within the next 24 hours...

...That would give Grosz, Berecz and Co...

...At this point, it is anyone's guess whether he would be willing to step down to make the HSP more electable...

...At best his chances in the January 7 Presidential balloting are 50-50...

...When Pozsgay's and Nyers' lieutenants joined the fray, insults and accusations began to fly, and soon the entire behind-the-scenes nominating process collapsed...

...Its failure goes along way toward explaining the ambiguous outcome of the HSWP's hoped-for rebirth as a Socialist Party...

...The paramount political event here this year was the conclusion on September 18 of the National Round Table negotiations...

...After the War, Nyers was instrumental in shepherding the Social Democrats into the Communist ranks...

...The control of the country's political agenda has fallen exclusively to the government and the Parliament...

...Adding to Pozsgay's embarrassment, three of his former allies who are leading members of the intelligentsia, Mihâly Bihari, Laszló Lengyel and Attila Agh, had promptly declined his invitation to have their names considered...

...Yet Nyers' policy speech announcing the historic transformation was not merely authoritative, it was authoritarian...

...The occasion of its death was the birth of the Hungarian Socialist Party (HSP), announced at a Congress of the departing Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (HSWP) held October 6-10...

...Meanwhile, the government is preparing a new set of austerity measures for next year, including the elimination of food price controls and the devaluation of the forint...

...The Party leadership helped to undercut the Reform Alliance...

...Pozsgay and Németh held a private showdown with Nyers over the proposed exclusion from the Executive of the highly popular reform spokesman Foreign Minister Gyula Horn...

...Still, knowing who the players are will not make the outcome of the elections easier to predict...

...More than 8 5 per cent of them were university graduates...

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

...It provided shelter for lower-ranking Party bureaucrats and traditional whitecollar Communists...

...Workers in scores of enterprises have responded by establishing "workers' councils" as their bargaining agents...

...Alas, very little is known about the local Hungarian "eligibles" who, it seems, will make or break the chances of the competing parties in 1990 and beyond...

...All the others serve without pay on a part-time basis, and only Chairman Nyers rates a Mercedes and a bodyguard...

...And, indeed, beyond the Congress hall Communists lacked the same resolve...

...and a group of disgruntled mass organizations known as the "third side...

...Unfortunately, no opposition "truth squads" were around to rebut this nonsense...

...The Central Committee also disapproved of Prime Minister Miklós Németh's tough stance against the Communist-affiliated Trade Union Federation in late August when it ordered a strike following a price rise...

...By the conclusion of the selection process on October 10, both sides' top strategists had been eliminated...

...He lashed out at Németh and his "government of experts" (a term of disgrace in Communist parlance), called for unity and discipline, and urged everyone down to conservative strays such as Jânos Berecz to stay on...

...Of the 1,256 delegates, 464 were pledged to the RA and 200 had declared for one of the other groups...

...Unless he can recast his image from Communist in-house rebel to Socialist statesman, his political career may well be over after the turn of the year...

...He remained silent about the Workers' Guard, the HSWP's electoral failures and the controversial disposition of its assets...

...What is more important, while the founding of the HSP definitively signaled the end of one-party dictatorship in Hungary, the HSWP is far from dead...

...Thus far, too, the Catholic Church has not been involved in politicking and one or another Christian party is likely to benefit from its support...

...Prime Minister Németh's adroit management of the now rudderless National Assembly is both a cause and an effect of the HSP's disorientation...

...Meeting with the international press following the speech, Nyers described himself as " an easygoing person" fond of "the style and thetasteof the 1930s," and "a reformer as early as 1953...

...In one form or another, it seems destined to reappear...

...Fed up with the ouvrierist demagoguery of the Jànós Kâdâr-Kâroly Grosz regime, they shared a desire for drastic change, rather than "renewal" of the old political model marked by corruption and the brazen sabotage of much-needed reforms...

...Those talks, which started in March, brought together three groups to prepare far-reaching reform legislation: the HSWP...

...The meeting was the first Communist conclave in the history of postwar Europe not manipulated beforehand by ruling Party bosses...

...Despite the presence of Nyers, Pozsgay, Németh, and Horn, the actual management of the body is in the hands of two members named "fulltime party employees...

...As the deadline approached, barely 4 per cent (less than 30,000) of the country's 725,000 Party members had signed on with the Socialists, prompting a quick decision to keep the rolls open through the end of December...

...Most Hungarians, though, considered the move merely a face-saving device, or worse: a ruse for smuggling conservatives back into power after they had ostensibly been voted out...

...Within hours, the word was out that the PD was the outfit to join if one wished to fall behind Nyers and his camp of cautious progressives...

...And the Party Chairman did not hesitate to take advantage of the situation...

...If this becomes a widespread phenomenon, Hungary's new, more lenient strike laws will probably be tested early next year...

...The most liberal caucus was made up of the HSWP Reform Circles, subsequently renamed the Reform Alliance (RA), and had the most important new players on the scene...

...Németh's, Pozsgay's, Horn's, and Speaker of the National Assembly Matyas Szürös' corresponding perks come with their positions in the government...

...Pozsgay's pre-Congress campaign promised a clean break with the past...

...Once the rules of the 1990 general election are defined by the Legislature, it will be possible to identify the serious contenders...

...The Workers' Guard was officially disbanded on October 23, and all workplace Party organizations have been ordered to dissolve 90 days before the spring elections...

...For the record, 16 of the HSP Executive Committee's 24 members belong to the Reform Alliance...

...BEYOND THE PARTY CONGRESS Hungary's Hazy Future BY RUDOLF L. ToKéS Budapest According to this country's largest newspaper, Nepszabadsag, the dictatorship of the proletariat came to an end in Hungary at exactly 10:24 p.m...

...The logical askingprice, of course, would be Nyers'job...

...The moderate conservative grouping was composed of the Rally for the Renewal of the HSWP, the Unity Platform for the HSWP, and the Leftist Alliance...

...The highlight of the four-day meeting, of course, was supposed to be the establishment of the Hungarian Socialist Party...

...For a moment at the end of September the prospects of the RA looked bright again...

...The HSP's Program and Statutes, and the substance of the HSWP's final economic and foreign policy reports were conceded, apparently without dispute, to Pozsgay's well-prepared teams of ideologues...

...In smoke-filled rooms their leaders and PD delegates sought to negotiate the composition of the HSP Executive Committee...

...Some of them may choose to join the HSP and ally themselves with the PD strongholds, or form conservative "workers'" and "Left-wing" sections that will inevitably struggle for autonomy...

...The Round Table Agreement was signed by the Party, six of the eight ORT constituents, and six of the seven "thirdside" organizations...

...Perhaps the fortunes of the HSP would pick up if Németh, now the party's most popular politician, could be persuaded to assume personal responsibility for membership recruitment and program development...

...When they threatened an RA walkout Nyers relented...

...Besides providing a degree of collective self-defense, the action is a vote of no confidence in the official trade unions...

...The Nyers speech shocked many reformers into questioning their participation in the whole course of events...

...83 per cent were Party officials, mainly from lower levels...

...Shortly afterward, divisions within the HSWP over the outstanding issues manifested themselves in the emergence of three major caucuses...

...Instead, he spoke of a new "social market" and called for a synthesis of socialism and democracy...

...and in 1958 he served on the Central Committee that voted to hang the leader of the 1956 uprising against the Soviets, Imre Nagy...

...Four groups of Communist stalwarts have already sprung up around the country, each solemnly proclaiming itself the rightful heir of the HSWP But the Socialist Party's biggest problem, and the reason it will almost surely suffer a resounding defeat in the elections next spring, is the lack of a dynamic leader who has both a credible program and national appeal...

...Since it was simply too late to start from scratch, an existing caucus had to be found to head off the RA...

...Nyers, certainly, has neither...

...This made the Nyers-Pozsgay agreement quite vulnerable, to put it kindly...

...Three months before, it is true, the Central Committee had nominated the most dynamic of the reformers, Minister of State ImrePozsgay, as the HSWP's candidate for President of the Republic...

...If he fails to publicly break with Nyers, he could be bested either by Minister of Justice Kâlmân Kulcsâr, the Patriotic People's Front (PPF) candidate who refused to join the HSP, or by historian Lajos Für, standard-bearer of the Hungarian Democratic Forum...

...Pozsgay met with Party Chairman Rezsö Nyers, a conservative-leaning moderate, to work out a compromise package for the impending Congress...

...A typical RA cell embraced young professionals, lowerlevel Party officials (particularly from the ideological and cultural apparat), assorted Young Turks with thwarted political ambitions, and sizable contingents of reformist Budapest intellectuals from all walks of life...

...The perception is that when push came to shove he sold out his partisans to Nyers and the unreformed apparat...

...What remains at issue is not the participation of the existing political parties, but whether mass organizations like the Trade Union Federation and various political clubs will be permitted to field their own candidates...

...a coalition of liberal non-Communist parties and quasi-parties called the Opposition Round Table (ORT...

...In return, Pozsgay secured Nyers' commitment to changing the Party name, to the full incorporation of the RA in the HSP leadership, and to his continued candidacy for President...

...The influence of General Secretary Grosz, the only hardliner in the country's four-man Presidium, was clearly on the wane since his demotion in June, but during the National Round Table negotiations he was nevertheless able to pressure the Party into vetoing a number of Pozsgay-sponsored measures...

...At its national conference in September the RA, riding a crest of popularity and urging pluralism, had called for the abolition of the Workers' Guard, thereturn of Party assets to the State, and the relocation of Party units from the workplace to local communities...

...To finesse the matter of publicly dumping the discredited HSWP deadwood, it was decided to "privatize" the process whereby Party members would transfer their loyalty to the new Socialist Party...

...Interestingly, under somewhat similar conditions in post-Franco Spain it took voters three to five years to become party partisans...

...The radical conservative formation consisted of the Ferenc Münnich Society (closely linked to the Workers' Guard), and three minuscule but vociferous groups—the Workers' Marxist-Leninist Party, the Communist Party of Hungary, and the Jânos Kâdâr Society...

...on October 7, 1989...

...an opportunity to gain unexpected electoral support for a resurrected, revamped HSWP that could take the offensive against the reformist "government of experts" now responsible for bringing the workers into line...

...Hungary's Communists were given three weeks to decide whether or not to sign a pledge of adherence to the Program and Statutes of the HSP The nearly certain prospect of arninority share of power in a democratic, pluralist Hungary could not have been easy for the delegates to face...

...Bynoon on the first day of the Congress the vehicle was located: the People's Democratic Caucus (PD), founded a year before by a group of good-natured young Marxist intellectuals...

...The over 1,200 delegates who converged on Budapest represented a new Communist middle class...

...These two working branches of the State are almost effortlessly pushing through legislation that the HSWP dared not even consider...

...But at that late date almost half the Congress delegates had yet to align themselves with one of the total of six different caucuses to be represented...

...At the moment the Hungarian government is not the shadow of any party—and surely not of the HSP, which can barely cast a shadow...

...Pozsgay, who over the past 20 years had developed a reputation as a man of vision and integrity, at present strikes most Hungarians as an exhausted, vacillating, somewhat disoriented politician incapable of meeting the dual challenge of presidential candidacy and party leadership...

...To understand the collapse of the HSWP, and the bleak prospects of its successor, it is necessary to take a few steps backward...

...His gestures and intonation were vintage Kâdâr...

...in 1953 he was an anonymous government bureaucrat...

...Even under the ambivalent Nyers, the Socialists cannot hope to accommodate Grosz' and Berecz' now politically homeless adherents...

...In the summer by-elections Hungarians tended to vote for personalities rather than parties...