The Hungarian natives are restless
by George Jonas
National Post
October 28, 2006
Hungary's government did celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution this week, if rather gingerly. Official events took place in front of Budapest's impressive neo-Gothic Parliament, attended by representatives of the ruling coalition of the Hungarian Socialist Party and the Alliance of Free Democrats. Ordinary Hungarians were not allowed to get within a kilometre of the building, according to opposition sources. Apart from the country's socialist rulers and trusted supporters, there were only invited foreign dignitaries at hand to listen to a military band and select performers reciting Hungarian poems.
The visitors may have enjoyed the band; few if any would have understood the poems. Beginning the night before, a barrage of special police units had cleared all surrounding streets, and even shut down the subway to prevent people who might have understood Hungarian poetry from getting off at the stop near the Parliament. The authorities feared that those who did speak the language might be inclined to commemorate the uprising of 1956 by staging another one.
It started with a scandalous admission. In a post-election speech to his caucus this spring, Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany confessed to having lied "day and night" to the people of Hungary to get elected. More than "admitted," he passionately and proudly declared it, complete with expletives, sounding like a Hungarian Richard Nixon. He told his colleagues that, having been returned to power, they had better stop lying and face the consequences of their socialist mismanagement of the economy for the past four years. Gyurcsany's proposed solution was for Hungarians to tighten their belts.
When someone put the purloined tape on the radio news a few months later, the natives -- understandably enough -- became restless. The speech was broadcast on Sept. 16. By the next day there were protests, demonstrations, even riots in the streets, injuring hundreds. The opposition went to town -- what opposition wouldn't? -- calling on Gyurcsany to resign. Former prime minister Viktor Orban, leader of the centre-right Alliance of Young Democrats (FIDESZ), supported the protests and condemned the riots only half-heartedly, if at all.
In most Western-style democracies, a prime minister would have resigned after such an embarrassing gaffe, if only to limit the damage to his party. His party might even have demanded it. But Hungary's socialists closed ranks behind their beleaguered leader, saying to the opposition, in effect: "We're in power for four more years, and you can go fly a kite."
Even without the leaked tape sparking riots, the neo-communist mandarins of Hungary might have felt ambivalent about celebrating the 50th anniversary of an uprising against their own heritage. The system Hungarians took up arms to topple on Oct. 23, 1956, was Mr. Gyurcsany's ancestral regime. Many prominent leaders and supporters of the Hungarian Socialist Party came from the ranks of the former communist nomenclature, or were (and are) tied to the old regime by kinship or marriage. Gyurcsany himself was a ranking member of the same hierarchy. He landed on his feet after the Soviet Union collapsed and became a millionaire. His wife is the granddaughter of a particularly nasty old-timer named Antal Apro, who fled the martyred Imre Nagy's cabinet to become a member of Janos Kadar's puppet government set up by the Soviets after they re-invaded Hungary on Nov. 4, 1956. Grandpa Apro, who died in 1994, played a leading role in the bloody repression of the revolution. Hungary's prime minister and his wife now live in his former villa.
Some consider bringing up such matters unfair. They say Hungary's ruling socialists aren't heirs to the oppressors of 1956, but to its champions. The Socialist government relies for its credentials on the reform-communist strain that sparked the uprising 50 years ago. Gyurcsany and his cabinet view themselves as successors to communists like Imre Nagy, who led the country in its brief and glorious hours, not to Janos Kadar, who sold out and betrayed it.
It's certainly true that 1956 started out as a reform-communist movement, designed not to do away with communism, but to put a human face on it. It's also true that Imre Nagy, eventually hanged by the Soviets for attempting to lead Hungary out of the Soviet bloc in 1956, had been a communist himself. Still, when all is said and done, Hungarians didn't go on the barricades 50 years ago for "reformed" or "humanized" forms of repression, but for liberty.
The rebels, dubbed freedom fighters, fought tanks with Molotov cocktails in 1956 for liberal values, represented this week by the protesters of Hungary's opposition parties, the Alliance of Young Democrats and the Christian Democrats, not by the Socialist government's police helicopters circling overhead. It was the peaceful opposition rallies that stood for the spirit of 1956, not the truncheon-wielding authorities that disrupted them.
The left's lies and truncheons come as no surprise. The mystery is, why did Hungarians give a slight edge at the polls, not once but twice in a row, to the new incarnation of the same communists they rebelled against 50 years ago? I have no answer. Neither have Hungary's voters, I suspect.