The Hungarian left at the
1. Parties, platforms and publications
So far as the organizational structures of the Left in Hungary are concerned, there is no other point to start with but the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP). Not because this party would be socialist in terms of ideology, or because it would be the only organization of the left in terms of party politics. The reason for the primacy of MSZP is that it is a conglomerate that is first of all the only solid organization in the left with strong electoral foundations and organizational capacities and because many other parties, platforms and publications can be characterised by their relations to MSZP.
The Hungarian Socialist Party was formed in October 1989, at the last congress of the old communist party, which was called the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (MSZMP). Instead of the more than 700 thousand members of the old party, MSZP had only about 30 thousand. Instead of the old links to the communist world, MSZP decided to join the Socialist International (SI), which they did in 1996. Despite the emphasis on the break with the past, however, MSZP inherited much of the property of MSZMP, and of course most of the members and leaders of the new party had been members of the old one.
The first president of MSZP was Rezsõ Nyers, who started his political career in the 1940s as a member of the Social Democratic Party, and who in the 1960s became known as the father of the famous economic reforms of Hungary. After the party was defeated in the 1990 general elections, Nyers was replaced by Gyula Horn, minister of foreign affairs in the outgoing cabinet. The party received 33 per cent of the vote in the 1994 general elections, and gained 54 per cent of the mandates due to the rather distortive electoral system of Hungary. Horn formed a coalition government with the liberal Free Democrats. The inevitable financial stabilization and some corruption scandals, however, undermined the popularity of the
Millennium
IN an article originally written for the German newspaper Neues Deutschland, Hungarian academic LASZLO ANDOR* presents a profile of the left in Hungary. coalition, and in the meantime the unity of the Right was restored. Thus in 1998 the Left was defeated at the elections, despite the fact that MSZP maintained its 33 percent support. Horn had to step down as a result as president of MSZP, and László Kovács, foreign minister of the defeated government, was elected president of the party.
In the 1990s, no other left wing parties managed to get into parliament in Hungary. In 1990, however, four of them were still very close, and in fact this disunity was one of the main reasons for the right wing victory in that year. In 1990, some left-wing sympathisers voted for the Social Democratic Party of Hungary, and others for the Patriotic Election Coalition, which was a successor of the former Patriotic People's Front (an umbrella organization that was among other duties responsible for holding parliamentary elections in the state socialist period). The rural left voted for the Agrarian Union, that tried to protect the collective farms, and the old and committed comrades voted for the revived MSZMP. A few years later this latter changed its name to Workers' Party, but its leader has remained the same, Gyula Thürmer, a young foreign policy expert. In its political profile, the Workers' Party is comparable to the German PDS or the Italian Rifondazione, and maintains close links with them.
Before 1989, much of the political press was owned by the MSZMP in Hungary. In 1989, most of these national and regional daily papers were turned into shareholder companies, and sold to majorlike Axel Springer. Népszabadság, the daily of the former communist party, became an interest of Bertelsmann, and, despite the general
Hungary * right-wing political mood in the country, remained the most popular daily paper of Hungary by far (a million readers per day). Népszava, the former trade union newspaper, has changed owners several times, and maintained much of its left leaning working class readership. When MSZMP was refounded after the creation of MSZP, the old guard launched the weekly Szabadság, which is still the only left wing political weekly in Hungary. Various MSZP and trade union organizations maintained their own bulletins, or even launched new ones, but these rarely came close to national significance, and remained important only for the particular area or locality.
MSZP continued to run the monthly Tarsadalmi Szemle until 1998, when its publication was halted for an indefinite period. Thus, by the end of the 1990s, only two left wing periodicals remained on the market. One of them is the quarterly Eszmélet, which was launched as an independent bimonthly in 1989 by representatives of the Hungarian "New Left", organized in the tiny Left Alternative Association. This political movement started in 1988 with about 300 members, and gained some significance in influencing left wing politics in the early 1990s. This was the only political tendency in Hungary that promoted a left-wing critique of and alternative to the failed state socialist regime, and advocated workers' ownership within the democratic political system.
Leaders of the Left Alternative became prominent in the Left Bloc — a radical platform — of MSZP, and the party related press foundations often provided support for Eszmélet. The other significant left wing periodical is Ezredvég, which is a cultural and political monthly supported by the Workers' Party. Eszmélet regularly publishes translations from leading contemporary left wing thinkers of the world (Wallerstein, Amin, Mészáros, Altvater, Petras, Brenner and so on), and Ezredvég provides space for the best of the Hungarian socialist literature and poetry.
With the support of the state and the
International Viewpoint #326 December 2000 13
Soros Foundation, there is a multitude of of 1956, since the suppression of the upris-
* Hungary liberal and conservative magazines in Hungary, and some representatives of the first group also publish articles by progressive authors. There is also an increasing number of environmentalist publications, but the political orientation of these is uncertain. With the withdrawal of the Soros Foundation and the strengthening right wing influence in the government bodies, the positions of the progressive press can be expected to weaken even more in the future. 2. Issues, initiatives and ideology
During the ten years since 1990, when the first general elections took place in Hungary after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the political landscape of the country has changed only marginally. So far as the parliamentary landscape is concerned, the same six parties entered parliament in the three post-communist general elections, with a small change in 1998 when the tiny Christian-Democratic party collapsed and its place was taken by the far right Party of Hungarian Justice and Life. In fact the presence of the latter was not entirely new, since their leader, István Csurka, was member of the first post-communist parliament as vice-president of the ruling Hungarian Democratic Forum. As for the extra-parliamentary parties, the revived communist party was the strongest force in the early 1990s, just like today, in 2000.
In terms of political ideology, the landscape has not changed either. The political rhetoric and the moral capital of the new forces in 1989 was linked to acheiving a transition, or systemic change, that would lead the nation from a one-party dictatorship with a centrally planned economy into a multi-party democracy with a market economy. Ever since this common political goal was defined in 1989, the agenda of politics in Hungary was the gradual perfection of this market democracy. Those who criticized the rulers claimed that the systemic change has not been accomplished properly, and the rulers often answered that the systemic change can only be accomplished under such and such circumstances, i.e. only if they get re-elected for another term.
In the political ideology of the Hungarian transition, the myth of the 1956 'revolution' has played an essential role.
The changes of 1989 started by a revision
14 International Viewpoint #326 December 2000 ing provided the legitimacy for the regime of János Kádár until the end of the 1980s. It was soon understood by all different left circles that no political force can survive in the post-communist era with a negative attitude to 1956. Thus the Socialist Party contributed to a cult of Imre Nagy, the executed prime minister, who was a communist and loyal to the Soviet Union until the end, but realized that without engaging with the popular sentiment the communist party could not create a democratic foundation for its power. Nagy, who was exhumed and reburied publicly in 1989, became a flag for the dominant pro-capitalist forces of MSZP. However, even the left of the party was affirmative on 1956, and highlighted the workers councils movement as the progressive legacy of the uprising. Party leader Gyula Horn, who joined Kádár's militia in 1956 to put down the uprising, had to apologize publicly, and confess that now he thinks about 1956 differently than forty years earlier.
In the early 1990s, the right wing government of Hungary attempted to pull the country out of state socialism into the past, instead of the future. Government policies were dominated by the attempt of a general social and cultural restoration. Even the interwar, semifascist dictatorship of Admiral Miklós Horthy was idealised by some, and the backward looking forces took advantage of the Millecentenarium of the Hungarian Conquest of the Carpathean Basin in 1996 and the Millennium of the foundation of the Christian Hungarian Kingdom in 2000.
However, some forces on the left have tended to look into the past instead of the future too. The contemporary Workers Party can with no exaggeration be called a nostalgia left, because their main message is that Hungarians lived better the regime of János Kádár, i.e. between the late 50s and the late 80s. A major gathering for the party which attracts thousands of people from all around the country is the anniversary of the passing of Kádár in early July. Recently, party leader Gyula Thürmer pictured himself with
Kádár's giant photo in the background.
Even if it is true that most of the Hungarian people had an easier life in the 1970s and 80s than in the decade of transition, the Workers' Party had to understand that it cannot base its future by looking only into the past. Some initiatives emerged that would turn the party into the Party of Social Europe, which is not necessarily a bad idea. However, it would not inevitably become a success, given that the party had already changed its name once less than a decade earlier, and it is doubtful that the same leadership under a different name could attract masses of young people, which is the issue of life or death for the Workers' Party in Hungary.
The Socialists have always wanted to distance themselves from the old communist party, and their modernization ideology was one of the instruments to serve this purpose. The programme of modernization was identified with the transition to market democracy and Euro-Atlantic integration. The Socialist Party has thus been no exception from the general tendency in the new Hungarian political elite, for whom Europe has been functioning as the positive utopia for the transition. Whenever politicians or social scientists tried to argue for something good or something better than we had, they called it European. This political linguistics resembled the earlier times when the adjective socialist functioned very similarly. This utopian land, however, was the Europe of the past, i.e. the pre-Maastricht model of neo-corporatism, social- and Christian democracies There has been very little analysis of what changes the end of the Cold War triggered off on the Western side of the continent, and in what ways the previous socio-political model of the European Community was undermined by the implementation of the single market and the drive towards the single currency.
Soon after the Socialist Party lost the
1998 elections, a debate about the Third Way emerged in Hungary as well, and even the search for "the Hungarian Tony Blair" began too. Ironically enough, the only possible candidate for this role is the former prime minister Miklós Németh, who spent the last nine years as vice-president of the London based European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. It is yet to be fought out between the current party leader László Kovács, ex-premiers Németh and Horn, and Péter Medgyessy, the former deputy for Németh, as to who should be the candidate for premiership for the Socialist Party in 2002. Four men, all of them former members of the Central Committee of MSZMP, and all of them economists by their training. This bias can be hardly compensated by the introduction of quotas for the representation of young people and women in the leading bodies of the party, which was done in 1999. An American political marketing expert, Professor Bruce Newman (DePaul University) advised MSZP to focus the campaign on the question of women in order to win the 2002 elections for a center-left coalition, but this will not be easy if the "gang of the four" take all media atten-
Having felt the shortcomings of the hitherto pragmatism, and in order to present something more than just personal rivalry, MSZP embarked on producing some major documents in the period 19982000. One of them was the Social Democratic Charter, and the other one the 15 year programme of the party. Both works were directed by the old sociologist Iván Vitányi, who had been one of the leading figures on the right wing of MSZP. Both works have been accomplished after producing tons of semi- and by-products, but none of them created a text that would signal clear alternatives and that would inspire a new generation to follow the values of the left. Without this latter, however, MSZP cannot even dream about replacing the current right wing coalition in 2002, since the right wing Alliance of Young Democrats-Hungarian Civic Party has managed to build up and maintain its popularity among the youth ever since the Socialist-Liberal coalition introduced tuition fees in higher education in 1995. To win the young vote for the left, the Socialist Party has started to build-up a campaigning around the internet, but still lacks a clear vision about a more egalitarian school system.
Similarly to the perspectives on youth, the case for ecology should be an integrated part of a progressive left programme in the 21th century, but we are still very far from it in Hungary. When the transition began, environmentalism as a political issue was thrown to the right, largely because of a very unfortunate debate over a dam on the river Danube. This project, launched in the 1980s, became a symbol of Stalinist gigantomania, and the emerging political dispute around it created a picture that the left is predominantly technocratic and ignorant about the natural environment, while the right wing parties were able to collect the sympathy and the vote of those who saw the environment threatened by the prevailing business mecha nism.
In the 1990s, the only achievement in
Hungarian PM Orbán this field was that the dam on the Danube was not built, but in many other areas environmental degradation and risk was just aggravated. In 1998-2000, the Orbán government featured a minister for the environment who not only hurt the national institutions of environment protection but turned this area into the most problematic one in the accession talks with the EU. The problem is that all this was not enough for the Left to develop a strong environmentalist tendency, and now, having sacked the trouble-making minister, the Right has the chance again to rebuild their constituency in this area.
The fundamental problem with the new MSZP documents, i.e. with the Charter and the Programme, is that the authors did not dare to drop the idea of perfecting the systemic change, though it has become clear that the people do not look on it with such positive attitudes and expectations as ten years earlier. In the meantime, it is more and more apparent that the programme and rhetoric of the left should be rethought and reformulated. Party leader László Kovács, for instance, claimed in opposition that unemployment was not a significant problem in Hungary since its
Hungary * rate has fallen below the Europen average, i.e. to some 7 per cent. The figure was correct, but the context was cheating, since the size of the inactive population grew very fast in the early 1990s, and the employment ratio of the Hungarian society remained in a very low range, i.e. around 54-55 per cent in the late 90s. In such circumstances the lack of jobs is indeed a burning issue, even if the official unemployment figures do not provide sufficient
The drama of unemployment becomes even more obvious when we realize that the miserable situation of the Roma population - the half a million strong community of Hungarian gypsies — is also largely due to the lack of jobs and the decline in the real value and availability of welfare provision by the state. In 1999, even the European Union mentioned the Roma problem as one of the most significant deficits of the development in Hungary. The EU, however, similarly to the Hungarian liberals, interpreted the Roma issue as a problem of minority rights and discrimination, as if it could be resolved simply in the area of ethics and political representation.
Of course, these are parts of the problem. We have to see, however, that the impoverishment of the Hungarian Roma in the 1990s has been a parallel process with the emergence of a new Hungarian underclass. And, this has been due to economic and welfare reform policies proposed by the IMF and the World Bank and also actively supported by the European Union. Raising the Roma problem in 1999 as an obstacle to the EU accession of Hungary is hardly more than sheer hypocrisy.
It should, however, be the Hungarian left who provides a proper analysis of the problems of the Roma and the new underclass, and who comes out with a blueprint of economic and social reforms that could strengthen social cohesion within the circumstances of a globalized market economy. This is not possible now without taking a critical position about the new capitalist system, i.e. focusing on the correction of the systemic change instead of its accomplishment, even if it is not easy to accommodate internationalism with egalitarian social policies in the first decade of the 21th century. * László Andor is an associate professor at the Budapest University of Economic Sciences and Public Administration and the author of Hungary on the Road to the European Union: Transition in Blue (Westport: Praeger, 2000) International Viewpoint #326 December 2000 15