Dr. György G.

MÁRKUS

Final Report to NATIP

on the Research Project

PARTY POLITICS, PARTY SYSTEM

AND THE DYNAMICS OF POLITICAL CLEAVAGES
IN HUNGARY

Budapest, June 1998

CONTENT S :

1. 1o Years of Multipartism in Hungary - Classical Cleavage Theory

Revisited

2. The Historical Dimension: Hungarian Cleavages and Parties Prior to

1989

3. Frozen Cleavages and Changing Parties in Post-Communist Hungary

from 1989 to Mid-1997

4. The Restructuring of the Party System:

NATO Referendum 1997 - Parliamentary Elections 1998
Conclusions

Literature
 CHAPTER ONE

10 YEARS OF MULTIPARTISM IN HUNGARY –

CLASSICAL CLEAVAGE THEORY REVISITED

THE CLEAVAGE BASIS OF THE PARTY SYSTEM AND THE STABILITY OF DEMOCRACY

In modern societies multipartism has proved to be the only viable and possible form of
democracy. Thus, the question about the consolidation of the party system in post-communist Hungary
involves the prospects of democracy itself. We accept the more or less consensual, conventional wisdom
of political science based on the historical experiences of Western countries: the stability of part
systems depends on the cleavage basis of the competing parties. This is a precondition for the popular
representativity of the parties, of the party system, this is the only way for them to present - in the form
of political options - well-defined social (or even historical) alternatives on one hand, and to create
strong and enduring identifications between segments of the society and themselves, to establish a
partisan linkage between social structure and government, between citizens and public policies. The
cleavage basis of the party system can be looked upon as a decisive factor of the legitimacy of
governance.
We mention two theoretical and practical dilemmas right at the beginning in connection with the
investigation of parties and cleavages in the context of a Central European post-communist country like
Hungary. One is the bias of overestimating the environmental deterministic constraints of political
actors and institutions and underestimating their - measure of - autonomy. For if we do so and conceive
of parties as prisoners of cleavages and commit the mistake of falling under a kind of economic o
'sociological superstition' (Sartori), we might come close to a TINA (There Is No Alternative)
proposition contradicting the very principles of democracy (which we also want to tie to the condition of
the existence of stable political cleavages). This dilemma is reflected in the on-going debate and
interaction between two schools or currents of political science: that of political sociology more inclined
to determinism, to the concept of the primacy of the social structure and the economy over politics, and
that of political institutionalism more inclined to the primacy of politics over the sub-systems of societ
biased towards concentrating on 'the actors' logic". (Lane-Ersson, Von Beyme)
The second dilemma is less general, more regional. In post-communist countries we witness
discontinuity, not only in the sphere of politics, but also in economy and social structure. For many, this
fact eo ipso involves the sheer impossibility of party competition and party politics based on stable
cleavage-based collective identities. Assuming an inherent weakness of civil society, the fragility and
fluidity of top-down created elite parties, taking into account the undeniable facts of electoral volatility,
rapidly changing partisan identities and party landscapes, the extremely low level of partisan
identification in the electorate, there is a strong tendency in political science in the research of post-
communist political systems to concentrate on the actors' logic, on institutions and on quantitative
empirical research neglecting the questions of systemic logic, avoiding theoretical synthesis. (Von
Beyme) One may refer either to the 'It is too early, to make generalizations' type of argument, or to the
overriding importance of international determinism in the light of which it does not seem to matte
much how national parties relate to domestic cleavages, Their subjective capacity to respond and to
adjust to external pressures and exigencies is decisive. Thus, in contrast to Western political science
with a more-or-less equilibrium of the two currents and with an ever increasing effort to combine these
approaches, we are confronted here in Hungary and most other East Central European (ECE) countries
with a bias of political science toward institutionalism and empirism
We might mention a very special Hungarian phenomenon standing in the way of progress
towards a theoretical synthesis. Not only parties, political actors are divided along sharp ideological
lines, but social and political scientists, as well, especially when they try to play political roles. Even
opinion poll makers are often divided along lines of partisan competition. Political scientists committed
to some kind of a normative description of the party system build their ideology - without being explicit -
into their constructs and the dialogue which could bring about a kind of synthesis is missing.

POLITICS BETWEEN ECONOMY AND CULTURE

Our approach to be pursued in this study is to rely on the classical cleavage and party theory of
Stein Rokkan linked with the work of S. M. Lipset. We want to test the applicability of their theory to
party formation, to the question of the cleavage basis of the party system and of the freezing of political
alternatives in post-communist Hungary. We aim to come to some conclusions concerning the dynamics
of party politics and the role of underlying cleavages and cleavage families. As a consequence of the
early death of S. Rokkan, his work, in spite its richness and extension, can not be regarded as finished.
In the following, we point to some of his basic ideas which have guided our research. i
1. Territory as a key concept of politics in a cross pressure between culture and economy,
implying:
- the equal weight given to economic, political-territorial and cultural dimensions;
- the interaction between geographical spaces and socio-cultural membership spaces, between
center formation and boundary building;
- the conceptual map of Europe with an West-East axis differentiating between economic
conditions for state-building and a South-North axis between cultural conditions for nation-building.
2. The identification of four cleavages following the critical junctures of:
- the national revolution creating the center-periphery and the church-state cleavages;
- the industrial revolution creating the urban-rural and the labour-capital cleavages.
 3. The cyclical movement of cleavages: towards a national-international divide. It is often
forgotten that Rokkan does not end his cleavage sequence with the 'worker-owner' conflict of the
'industrial revolution', but points to 'an intriguing cyclical movement':
- breakdown of a supranational order (Roman Empire)
- establishment of culturally and politically distinctive nation states
- 'conflict over national versus international loyalties'. (Lipset-Rokkan 47-48)
Although the last formulation relates to the 'communist' cleavage within the labour movement
(not relevant any more), but in his latest works he points to the centrality of a reformulated version of a
center-periphery divide: that between homogenizing supranational standardization and cultural
distinctiveness, roots, national identity. ( Rokkan- Urwin, Flora 1983: 434)
4. The different political impacts of a gradual, organic sequence of cleavages ( in most of North
Western Europe) versus the cumulation of state and nation-building cleavages together with the rapidity
of enfranchisement and sudden modernization.
The second alternative - especially in the case of the discontinuity of or threats to national independence
- implies difficulties in transition to mass democracy. (Hungary is directly mentioned by Rokkan in this
latter context.) (Flora 1983: 22) "Territorial-cultural conflicts do not just find political expression in
secessionist and irredentist movements, however, they feed into the overall cleavage structure ... and
help to condition the development not only of each ... party organization but even more of the entire
system of party oppositions and interests" (Lipset-Rokkan 41).
5. The historical long term continuity of collective political identities coalitions and oppositions
on the level of alternatives, of parties and of the support market to be mobilized.
"Parties do not simply present themselves de novo to the citizens at each election; they each have
a history and so have the constellations of alternatives they present to the electorate." (Lipset-Rokkan: 2)
Emerging cleavages affect, however, former alliances and restructure the party system. Rokkan points
also to the existence of a certain lee-way for parties to translate social cleavages. Rokkan and Lipset -
without detailed explanation - hinted at "the possibility that the parties themselves might establish
themselves as significant poles of attraction and produce their alignments independently of the
geographical, the social and the cultural underpinnings of the movements." (Lipset-Rokkan 3) This
question is taken up by G. Sartori developing it into the concept of the autonomy of parties in
channeling, selecting, subduing or mishandling cleavages.
6. The freezing of party alternatives with the final extension of suffrage (mostly in the twenties),
implying the inclusion of the lower classes.
In contrast to an expanding support market with a creative phase of parties (Cotta 102)
accompanied by a mobilization along cultural and territorial cleavages, the mobilization on the basis of
purely economic cleavages comes only afterwards (Rokkan 1980: 118). The stage of mass democracy
brings about an ever more closed electoral market with a mobilization controlled by the already existing
parties.ii
 As a kind of a particular development, Rokkan also refers to the possibility of the discontinuity or
disruption of party alternatives in contrast to the continuity of political alternatives (France, Germany,
Italy) (Lipset-Rokkan: 53).
7. The special role of social democratic parties on the left side of the labour-capital cleavage.
Due to their strength and "domesticability", their 'ability to maintain unity in the face of the man
forces making for division and fragmentation' (Lipset-Rokkan: 46), social democratic parties and the
class cleavage in itself played a stabilizing and homogenizing, cohesive influence in most West
European party systems.(In the golden post-war decades of industrial society, at least...). In countries
with a troubled history of nation-building, marked cultural cleavages reduced their potentials. But the
very logic of pluralism in democratic capitalism helped their entry into national politics. These parties,
"having joined the nation" contributed to the neutralization of the radicalizing effects of sudden
industrialization. (Lipset-Rokkan: 46, 48, 50)

8. The 'radical rightist' anti-system cleavage.

"...The rising networks of new elites, such as the leaders of the new large bureaucracies of
industry and government, those who control the various sectors of the communication industry, the
heads of mass organizations, the leaders ... of once weak or low-status groups, and the like..." constitute
the focus of protest of fascist-type parties, which:
- are nationalistic, they "venerate" the nation and its culture;
- are anti-democratic;
- want to unite their supporters as one single 'pillar' lead by "deeply felt convictions about the
destiny and the mission of the nation".
These xenophobic and racist parties may mobilize segments of the middle and lower classes. As
to their emergence and chances of success, "'contrasts in the continuity and regularity of nation-building
certainly played a role" (Lipset-Rokkan 23, 24, 25).

THE TABULA RASA HYPOTHESIS

Before trying to test the applicability of the Rokkanian theses to the Hungarian post-communist
party landscape, let us outline the antithesis contradicting to our assumptions in favor of a qualified, i.e.
not a literal, but a substantive application of the Rokkanian model to Hungary. In contrast to L.-D.
Seiler's insistence concerning the relevance of the conceptual framework of Rokkan after the implosion
of the Soviet Empire and a 'classical' cleavage structure in post-communist party systems (Seiler 1993,
1995), there is a school of the tabula rasa hypothesis (Markowski 1997: 247, Kitschelt 1995: 450). This
line of argumentation accentuates the lack of historic cleavage dimensions, the absence or weakness of
social cleavages, the chaotic socio-economic environment, the fluidity of economic relations, the
cacophony of political entrepreneurs, civilizational incompetence and an international environment
which has little room for alternatives. The electoral market is open and available.(Mair 1997)
Programmatic differences are just window-dressing. (Bialasiak 1997: 25, Kitschelt 1995: 450-452)
"What is perhaps most striking about new party systems which are currently emerging in post-
communist Europe, is precisely their lack of systemness... And it is this very absence, in turn, which is
likely to play such a crucial role in encouraging and facilitating electoral instability. At the very least, it
is clear that the combination of a weak cleavage structure, an uncertain and volatile institutional
environment, and a very open and unpredictable structure of competition cannot enhance the prospect
of rapid consolidation." (Mair 1997: 192) These are heavy sentences implying a hard judgment written
down by one of Europe's leading party researchers. Of course, there is some truth in arguments like this.
But we observe here an over-generalization and a lack of differentiation. Similarly to the
counterargument and corrections put forward by other authors (Bielasiak, Cotta, Kitschelt, Comisso),
one can point to the following facts, factors conditions and options:
- the learning process of political actors and of the electorate;
- crystallization processes in political structures, progress in the economy;
- the consolidating influence of the international environment;
- the length of system time.
There are country differences regarding:
- civilizational competence;
- economic and social indicators;
- the location on the geopolitical map;
- the embeddedness into international organizations;
- the structure of authoritarian rule and the type of transition;
- pre-communist political history;
- timing and mode of modernization;
- history of statehood and nation-building.
Some of the factors concerning volatility, changing partisan identities, changes and transformations in
the party structure and the underlying cleavages may more or less resemble recent changes in mature
democracies. We go as far as to point to the possibility that East Central European (ECE) democracies
might even anticipate some tendencies latent in developed, mature democracies (De Wale 880) in a
context of globalization and post-industrial civilization.
We find, however, that there are important arguments in Peter Mair's analysis for the
understanding of the cleavage basis of party competition in ECE. One is connected with the functional
over-load thesis (Offe 1991, Bielasak 1997: 24): too many issues (national identity, economic
transformation, social structure etc.) are to be addressed simultaneously. This is a difficulty for forming
structured political identities. Especially when the players themselves determine the rules of the game
with which it will be decided who will be a fellow player. For Mair, this is 'system-building' with powe
itself as a stake too high. He concludes: since it is a lot to play for, competition will be so intense that the
party system will be inherently unstable. (Mair 1997: 196-197). Again we underline: there is a core of
truth in the argument. But nevertheless, in Hungary and in similarly progressing new democracies, the
basic processes of power and wealth distribution have been more or less completed. Of course, there is
still much to compete for, e.g. for redefining some important rules of political and economic decision
making, for resource redistribution, and, last but not least, for the roles and positions of rival elite
groups. This is an axis of competition, this is linked to structures, collective identities and interests of a
society in transition. It is a social and political cleavage which cannot be deducted from the Rokkanian
scheme. It will not be as enduring as other basic 'classical' cleavages, but it is there. In Hungary, it has
been the central - cleavage-related - issue of the 1998 elections in the form of a post-communist - anti-
post-communist faultline. The articulation of this cleavage is, of course, highly competitive, but it is part
and parcel of the consolidation of democracy.

PARTY THEORY AND THE HUNGARIAN EXPERIENC

Confronting our findings (discussed in the following chapters in a more detailed analytical
description) with the major points of the Rokkanian concept of cleavages and with the arguments of the
tabula rasa hypothesis, we can come to the following conclusion: a substantive application of the
classical framework combined with an evolutionary process understanding of the Hungarian party
system (Bielasiak) may render explanatory power. In this sense, we formulate our assumptions.
• The evolution of the Hungarian party system confirms the classical sequence of European
cleavage formation with the initial and decisive emergence of identity-based territorial and
cultural divides followed later by the appearance of economic cleavages.
• The salient expression and cumulation of cultural and territorial cleavages with thei
dominance over socio-economic divides in the party system corresponds clearly with the
cyclical movement in the framework of the Rokkanian scheme manifesting now globall the
centrality of a national-supranational divide (Touraine). Hungarian party competition
seems to reflect and even to anticipate new developments of Western party systems.
• There are real historical alternatives expressing different conceptions of modernization, of
nationhood and of geopolitical location represented by the parties. These alternatives are olde
than the electorate, but in their political representation they deviate from the mainstream in
Western Europe: we find no direct link between the changing parties and the frozen
alternatives. This is a consequence of discontinuity, of the totalitarian and authoritarian rules
prior to 1989.Thus, we have to do with a particular form of 'freezing'. For Rokkan and Lipset,
party alternatives and the party system itself freeze. In Hungary and in some other ECE
countries, e.g. in Poland (Tworzecki) parties, partisan identities change in rather short
 intervals, parties and party structure are unstable and fluid. But the alternatives contained in
the cleavage structure are amazingly stable: not the party system, but the cleavage structure
is frozen. In the formation process of the parties (1988-89), in the subsequent three elections
from 1990 to 1998, the same cleavage sets have mattered and structured party competition,
namely: the three cleavage families of Westernization vs. traditionalism, post-communism vs.
anti-post-communism and pro-market commodification (winners) vs. welfare statist
decommodification (losers). While in Western democracies parties are rooted in cleavages, to
be more exact, are tied to distinct cleavage sides most Hungarian parties are eithe in search
for social and cultural cleavages to embark upon, even crossing the cleavage lines, or are
rooted in opposite cleavage sides . Thus, Sartori's thesis about the autonomy of actors in
structuring the political space also has a strong explanatory power for Hungarian politics.
This flux of party identities is, in recent years, to a certain extent, a tendency present in West
European party systems, as globalization and the emergence of an information societ
transforms the cleavage basis of the established party systems.(Touraine) The evolutionary
process of party politics in Hungary, inspite all contradictions, goes in the direction of more
structure, more system, combining, however, cross-cutting and mutually reinforcing
cleavages.
• This special freezing of alternatives and cleavages has, however, taken place in the context of
a very much open and available electoral market . This deviance from the Rokkan-Lipset
freezing pattern is the unavoidable consequence of the long discontinuity of the party system,
the lack of traditions of mass democracy and the unstable interest structure of civil society.
Although there are some sociological and demographic explanatory factors of party support,
the overall tendency is volatility, an extremely low degree of party identification coupled with
an inherited non-participatory political culture with apathy or even hostility towards
parties.(Gazsó-Stumpf, Körösényi 1998) Parallel with the tendency of realignment, i.e. cleare
poles, and of alignment on the level of political actors, we also observe a massive dealignment
on the level of (non-)voters.
• Due to the strong economic, social and political positions of the post-communist elites and
surviving value orientations in the electorate, 'the definition of the rules of the game" as a
systemic issue (Offe 1991, Mair 1997) is expressed by the salience of a 'post-communism -
anti-post-communism' cleavage family. It cannot be deducted from the Rokkan-Lipset
scheme, and by its very nature, cannot become a long-enduring historical divide, but can be
supposed to fade away. That development might bring about a restructuring the cleavage basis
and the party system itself in the non-distant future.
• The taming of capitalism, the political regulation of the market with a political mobilization
along a commodification - decommodification axis is a crucial point of democratic
consolidation and legitimacy. Following from the freezing of the Hungarian political cleavage
 structure in the phase of the dominance of the cultural-territorial and post-communist
cleavage families, the increasing importance of this socio-economic divide is coupled with its
absorption by or inclusion into the other two cleavage families.
• The post-1989 evolution of the Hungarian party system has brought about no political
mobilization along the line of a classical labour-capital class cleavage. Instead, we have
observed the following attempts for bringing the welfare statist decommodification cleavage
in:
- coupling it with the post-communist cleavage as the defense or restoration of certain pre-
1989 structures and values and with the contradictory evolutionary transformation of the
post-communist Socialist Party being a member of the transnational political family of
social democracy;
- coupling it with the defense of national identity, a national path of modernization in face of
a global supranational capitalism, in form of a stronger representation of nationhood and the
nation state;
- coupling it with the religious cleavage, with Christian values, especially in a context, in
which there is a correlation between poverty, marginalization and church-going frequency;
- coupling its radical variant (anticapitalism) with an aggressive, xenophobic, authoritarian
and fundamentalist social nationalism as the post-communist equivalent of e.g. the French
frontism of Le Pen.

CLEAVAGE STRUCTURE IN HUNGARY

We have already pointed to and shall later discuss extensively our own typology of cleavages fo
Hungary and presumably also for other ECE countries: iii
1. The family of territorial and cultural cleavages
Traditionalist forces stress historical continuity, Hungarian nationhood, favour community ove
society, are for strong authority, strong church. Their value orientations are more particularist than
universalist, they have an inclination 'to love the rural', even if they are urban
Westernizers are outward-looking, for catch-up modernization, they favour individualism, multi-
cultural diversity, they stress secularism and human rights.
2. The family of post-communist cleavages
This set of cleavages has several dimensions
- an ideological dimension of anticommunism which can be based either on particularist
national, religious identities or on the universalism of individual human rights and
rationality;
- a political dimension expressed in the relationship to the Socialist Party looked upon as the
successor party;
 - a power dimension of competing elites and of the re-definition of the rules of the game outside
and inside politics;
- a structural dimension reflecting the symbiotic dualism of the present society with a secto
rooted in late communism and a sector of emerging capitalism iv;
- an emotional and biographical dimension with a population split into two halves: one half who
feel they lived better in the last years of 'real socialism' and another half thinking differently.
3. The family of socio-economic cleavages
With economic transformation progressing and with an overwhelmingly materialist electorate
this set of cleavages has become central in the society, but the early freezing of the party system
structured along the above mentioned two cleavage sets is still complicating the clear translation of this
divide into programmatic and public policy alternatives. One pole of this cleavage family is radical
commodification, deregulation with a high speed and broad extension of marketization, privatization, a
primary market distribution of wealth and incomes with marked inequalities, the other is the limitation
of the market, a certain measure of decommodification with extended welfare statism, with an active and
strong state regulating the economy, helping the poor, enhancing mobility and broad middle classes.
The Hungarian party system - inspite of self-locations and self-definitions - can hardly be
adequately described in the traditional terms of a Left-Right continuum, since what can be termed as
culturally "Left" is often paired with "rightist" socio-economic positions and vica versa.

CLEAVAGE-BASED AND CHANGING PARTY IDENTITIES (SUMMARY) v

Before briefly describing the parties that have become 'national players' in the period from 1988
and 1998 and trying to locate them in our cleavage scheme, we underline a specific paradox: parallel
with the intensive and polarizing competition along cleavage axes between party blocs and parties, there
is a contradictory heterogeneity, not only among the electoral segments supporting the individual parties
but in the parties as well including elites and rank-and-file membership, cleaving the parties themselves
along the basic faultlines of political competition. In the longer run, however, there is a tendency
towards the clarification of party identities and a reduction of the number of the main political actors.
Another paradox is the over-competitiveness of the party system versus a consensus oriented citizenry.

The Alliance of Free Democrats - Szabad Demokraták Szövetsége (SZDSZ)

The constant element of SZDSZ is its commitment to radical Westernization with decisively anti-
nationalist, secularist individualist and human rights centered positions of social libertarianism . The
party is rooted in the Budapest centered intellectual dissident movement, the Democratic Opposition.
This gave the party a strong anti-communist, anti-post-communist impetus in the beginning. Responding
to nationalist tendencies in the governing parties of the traditionalist camp, it came close to the
Socialists and in 1994 as junior partne joined the government lead b the post-communists. As to the
socio-economic set of cleavages, it has represented a neo-liberal radical commodification policy option.
Parliamentary seats (out of 386):
1990: 92 1994: 69 1998: 24

Hungarian Democratic Forum - Magyar Demokrata Fórum (MDF)

For long, MDF was the hegemonic party of the traditionalist camp uniting popular nationalists
and pro-European modernizing patriots. It was ready at first to make compromises with national minded
post-communists. Responding to the successful anti-communism of the early SZDSZ, it went over to a
radical anti-communist position. As to the socio-economic set of cleavages, a soft version of
commodification prevailed. Splits by militant nationalists and by pragmatic moderates, the traumatic
experience of the 1994 defeat, permanent tensions between a more radical membership and a less radical
leadership have weakened the party
Parliamentary seats:
1990: 164 1994: 38 1998: 17

Christian Democratic People's Party - Kereszténydemokrata Néppárt (KDNP)

A traditionalist historical party strongly rooted in a narrow - rural and aging - Catholic
subculture became a satellite of the governing MDF. An anti-communist profile was combined with
welfare statist positions. After the 1994 electoral defeat the search for a more characteristic part
identity lead to a self-destructing clash between moderates and radicals. The latter won the battle and
located the party close to the militant nationalist forces on the platform of social nationalism.
Parliamentary seats:
1990: 21 1994: 22 1998: 0

Party of Hungarian Truth and Life - Magyar Igazság és Élet Pártja (MIÉP)
A party founded in 1993 by I. Csurka, former vice-president of the MDF on the basis of a neonazi
ideology offered by intellectuals and appealing to frustrated losers of the middle and lower strata.
It is a party of social nationalism , relatively strong in the capital and its agglomeration, and
among the younger generation, combining anti-Western, racist and anti-communist positions with the
vision of a de-commodifying strong 'nation building state'.
Parliamentary seats:
1994: 0 1998: 14

Hungarian Democratic People's Party - Magyar Demokrata Néppárt (MDNP)

 A party founded in early 1996 by MPs of the MDF on the basis of a pragmatic anti-radicalism on
the ideals of West European Christian Democracy. Staying on the platform of 'soft traditionalism' 'soft
anti-post-communism', and 'soft commodification' occupying a centrist place in an over-competitive
party system they severely failed in 1998.
Parliamentary seats:
1996: 15 (MDF mandates) 1998: 0

Independent Smallholders', Land Workers' and Bourgeois Party - Független Kisgazda

Földmunkás és Polgári Párt (FKGP)
This historically significant agrarian party joined the traditionalist government coalition in 1990
as a force with national-Christian and anti-communist identity and a single-issue position of full
reprivatization in the dimension of socio-economic cleavages. The decision of party leader J. Torgyán to
leave the government in 1992 was followed by fierce fractional struggles and splits. Although the
majority of MPs, excluded from the party, continued to support the government, Torgyán was able to
control the party and to transform it into a rural based general protest party of social nationalism . Its
charismatic, but at the same time unacconntable leader defines its party at least as much as its cleavage
basis. After a period of long anti-cosmopolitan, anti-communist and economically extremely populist
radical mobilization, there are some signs of self-restraint and move to the center.
Parliamentary seats:
1990: 44 1994: 24 1998: 48

Hungarian Socialist Party - Magyar Szocialista Párt (MSZP)

Growing out of the reformist wing of the former state party this conglomerate party very strongly
cleaved in itself is embedded in the post-communist cleavage family in a double sense: as to membership
and supporters, political culture, traditions of informal decision-making, clientelistic relations, it is
rooted in the surviving late-Kádárian sector of the Hungarian society. At the same time it is intertwined
with mighty segments of the economic, financial and professional elites running the sector of emerging
capitalism. As to the way and style of policy-making, there are also rival late-Kádárian and anti-
Kádárian groups in the party. In the dimension of the territorial-cultural cleavages, from 1995, the party
has practically become the leading force of radical Westernization.
As to the location of the party in the socio-economic cleavage, there is a marked contrast between
the policy of radical commodification pursued from 1995, on one side, and the actual welfare statist
preferences of the majority of its voters corresponding more to the social democratic self-definition of
the MSZP.
Parliamentary seats:
1990: 33 1994: 209 1998: 134
 Workers' Party - Munkáspárt (MP)
Being the continuation of the orthodox wing of the former state party with a new refor
communist image the MP is firmly rooted in the corresponding cleavage family and takes the adequate
anti-commodification, i.e. welfare statist side, critical of capitalism, of privatization. Its location in the
cultural-territorial cleavage dimension is contradictory: its nationalism is paired with anti-clericalism.
MIÉP and MP are equally committed opponents to Hungarian NATO membership.
MP has no representation in the Parliament, receives, however, a permanent 3,5-4% of the votes.

Alliance of Young Democrats - Hungarian Civic Party* - Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége -

Magyar Polgári Párt (FIDESZ-MPP)
We might call FIDESZ a strategic party, a free-rider of political cleavages , in the meaning that
its cleavage roots, membership basis and organizations are weak but it is consciously looking for the
social and cultural cleavages enabling it to occupy a political space with the best chance of collecting a
majority of votes and getting into the gravitational center of the party system. At the point of its
establishment by fresh university graduates (mainly coming from the faculty of law) FIDESZ had just
two fixed points: its radical opposition to the communist regime and the protection of its organizational
autonomy. (Bozóki-Javornicky-Stumpf 1998: 106) In the context of the cultural divide between SZDSZ
'urban' westernizers and MDF national-popular traditionalists they declared first to be the children of
divorced parents. This corresponded also to their social background: they were mostly first generation
intellectuals coming from 'the province'. When they had decided, however, that liberalism was the
ideology most distant from communism, they became radical westernizers, secular, alternative, actionist,
anti-nationalist. This brought them as close to SZDSZ that they got looked upon as 'the younger brothers
and sisters' of the Free Democrats. When the 'cultural struggle' resulted in a rapprochement between
SZDSZ and MSZP, they first reiterated their standing above the cultural divide. Realizing that there was
no space for centrists in a system of cultural politics, they crossed the cleavage line and defined
themselves as a party of national liberalism. Seeing the vacuum on the side of moderate Christian
Democratic parties, they came to stress Christian values. They have arrived at an intermediate position
of 'soft westernization' or national modernization.
In opposition to the soft market liberal approach of the governing MDF they had chosen to be
strongly market liberals in a very pragmatic fashion. Later, they responded, however, to the neoliberal
monetarism of the MSZP-SZDSZ coalition by stressing social protection and growth induction arriving
at the position of 'soft commodification', guided by a strong and active state.
Parliamentary seats:
1990: 21* 1994: 20 1998: 148

*
This Hungarian word has a double meaning: civil (civic) and bourgeois.
*
In 1992 in opinion polls, FIDESZ reached almost 40%.
Empirical validity
Our theoretical model has been validated by empirical investigations. British scholars relying on an
extensive data basis and sophisticated mathematical methods confirmed the strength of elite issue
cleavages and found "rigorous support for Márkus' claim for the preeminence of broadly cultural
and national issues in structuring mass ideology in Hungary, at least in the early stages of the
transition " (Evans-Whitefield 1995:1184).

Before coming to a more detailed investigation of the post-1989 party landscape, in the next chapter we
shall deal with the past, with the impact of actual party politics on
• the long lines in the history of Hungarian state and nation building
• the location of the country on the conceptual map of Europe
• the particular features of modernization
• the pre-communist political and party systems
• the nature of the communist rule
• the pre-conditions of the transition.

REFERENCES
 CHAPTER TWO

THE HISTORICAL DIMENSION: HUNGARIAN CLEAVAGES AND PARTIES

PRIOR TO 1989

TERRITORIAL IDENTIT
Although their original analysis did not include Eastern Europe nor the territorial
consequences of two world wars, the theoretical work of Stein Rokkan and Seymour
Martin Lipset permits us to put Hungarian regime change into a broader historical and
territorial perspective and arrive at a better understanding of the changes that have taken
place, the nature of past and present cleavages, and, most importantly for our presen
purposes, the party systems that have evolved ( Lipset and Rokkan 1967; Flora 1983:
19).
The successive collapses of the Ottoman, Austrian and Russian empires brough
about major changes in the conditions of state and nation building in the region east of
the Germanic territories (Flora 1983: 19) Territorial consolidation, external boundaries,
the administrative and cultural penetration of territories have all become open problems
in a context of huge socio-economic dislocation, deprivation, inequality and ideological
vacuum. Following the collapse of the Soviet dominated Eastern bloc and of the Sovie
empire, in a geographical space where the fit between state and nation has traditionally
been unstable, the struggle between center and periphery has inevitably become the
dominant cleavage, a cleavage linked to conflicting cultural, linguistic, religious, ethnic
and economic claims and exacerbated by economic collapse.
It is important, however, to distinguish between Eastern Europe “ proper” and
the countries of the interface periphery or buffer zone caught in cross-pressures between
major state-building centers (Flora 1983: 19). Thus we come to the distinct category of
East Central Europe, a region whose structural traits reflect a historically changing mix
of West and East European components (Szûcs 1990; Bibó 1992). In Eastern and South
Eastern Europe the emerging political landscape is characterized by a center-peripher
cleavage between “ we” and “ they” groups of primordial identities - and ruling
Communist parties did not hesitate to take up ethno-nationalist and/or imperialist issues.
In (East) Central Europe cultural politics1 evolved as a key factor in the cleavage
between center and periphery, as parties formed around the question of territorial and
national response to the gravitational attraction of “ the Western world” or global
“ triad capitalism.” In response to the universalist standardizing traits of democratic
capitalism adopted by the center, the political actors of the periphery have become
culturally divided between those ready to make a radical adjustment and those
determined to defend separate national identities.
The domestic political landscape of post-communist societies is further
complicated by the fact that the ruling national and multinational political institutions of
the West have failed to develop an adequate strategy for responding either to the region
as whole or to the individual countries, a situation in sharp contrast to the clear and
material commitment of the allied powers for the democratization and reconstruction of
West Germany, Italy and Japan after World War II. The major cause of this failure is
“ bad timing,” i.e., the fact that the changes in the East have taken place during an era
when the Western world is facing a deep and painful process of transformation, due to
the emergence of a post-industrial civilization, of post-modernity, and of a general trend
to globalization undermining the traditional role of the nation state. The prevailing and
dominating neo-liberal monetarist paradigm had special disruptive effects for Eastern
countries.
The decline of industrial society carries with it the decline of the centrality of the
class cleavage. Territorial and cultural cleavages become ever more dominant.
centralizing system of standardization comes into conflict with the protection of cultural
distinctiveness and the autonomy of individual countries and regions. Universalism wars
with particularism (Rokkan 1982; Touraine 1994). At the same time, an urban-rural
(center-periphery) cleavage coinciding with a federalist versus anti-federalist cleavage is
gaining strength at the level of Europe and within the E.U. member nations ( Andeweg
1995).
These contemporary complications arise out of a yet more complicated past.
Nowhere is the past more complex and more powerfully significant in explaining
contemporary cleavages and parties than in Hungary, as we seek to explain in the presen
chapter.
THE EVOLUTION OF CLEAVAGES
The location of Hungary in a geopolitical buffer zone or interface periphery has
resulted in a permanent instability in the processes of state-formation and nation-building
and these discontinuities and disruptions have had their impact on collective memory.
Conquered by the Ottomans, then subject t Habsburg rule, then defeated (in 1848-49)
in the revolutionary quest for independence, Hungary did not achieve even semi-
independence until 1867, when a compromise solution gave the Hungarian polity a
measure of autonomy within the Habsburg monarchy
The party landscape prior to World War I was characterized by the division
between those who accepted the Austro-Hungarian compromise and those who
continued the quest for national independence. As in other regions with a history of
absolutist feudal regimes constraining bourgeois and civil development, national identity
preceded the nation state, and brought with it early forms of cultural politics. Those who
aspired to national emancipation often became opposed to socio-economic
modernization, perceived as something alien. As early as the rule of Joseph II (1780-
1790) when a programme of enlightened absolutism coupled social modernization with
cultural Germanization, and continuing during the first years of the nineteenth century,
the two ideas became ever more clearly opposed, however diligently the slogan
“ Fatherland and Progress” may have been brandished about. As Count István
Széchenyi, the great reformer of the nineteenth century pointed out, anyone who tried to
cooperate with “ Vienna” in the interest of national bourgeois development, the “ de
facto politicians of the Vienna air,” were labeled traitors by “ the ex principio
patriots” of the Hortobágy puszta (steppes east of the Danube) (Quoted by K. Kulcsár,
Magyar Nemzet, December 23 1989). The cleavage between modernization and
nationalistic traditionalism expressed a real development, rooted in the very substance o
modernization as a historical, social and cultural process, “ a process of social change
whereby less developed societies acquire characteristics common to more developed
societies.” (Lerner 1968) The question was how best to combine the universal with the
particular, the past with a vision of the future, the patterns provided by tradition with the
blueprints offered by others, the existent dependence and the hoped for sovereignty
(Gerschenkron 1962). The cleavage has not always been sharp and clearly defined. At
some points of history, as in the “ reform age” preceding 1848, and again during the
bourgeois and national revolution of 1848/49 itself, modernist and patriotic forces could
ally or even merge. Traditionalists have sometimes supported a type of modernization
which - as an alternative to catch-up adjustment - focuses on preserving national cultural
values and identities, as in Japan. Moderate traditionalists both prior to and after 1989
have claimed to seek to “ select those techniques of modernization which correspond to
our awareness of tradition, our experience of identity” and may “ relate to external
models with obligatory suspicion. ” (Kulin 1995)
Traditionalists stress Hungarian nationhood above all, and favor strong authority, a
strong church, and the community. Traditionalism has not been confined to a single class,
nor to the clergy. Traditionalists included populists (or narodniks) as well as all those
who favor Gemeinschaft (community) over Gesellschaft (society), those who are
inward-looking, and those who draw their arguments from history and poetry are all
traditionalists. Traditionalists were traumatized by the Versailles treaty of 1920 (the
“ trauma of Trianon” ) and have never abandoned the dream of bringing all Hungarians
back together. Westernizers, on the other hand, have been more likely to favor catch-up
modernization and individualism, multicultural diversity, a secular state, and human
rights. They have been outward-looking, drawing their arguments from sociology and
seeking the development of the civil society. Westernizers have been readier to accep
given (imposed) boundaries and treat the problem of Hungarians living elsewhere
basically as a human rights problem.
In contrast to party stabilization on the basis of structured cleavages in the West,
party formation in Hungary was an enterprise of elite networks. In this tradition parties
have emerged as intellectual “milieu parties” in which the collective memory, the
common language and aesthetic taste of the relevant subculture were more importan
than the substantive content of party programs. Two characteristic features arise fro
this type of party formation. The first is “pre-modern”: party struggles have a “tribal
character, with strong emotionalization. Psychological factors, in particular subjective
prejudices and sympathies, are permanently entrenched. The second trait can be seen as
“post-modern”: parties have unclear profiles and do not offer clear cut policy
alternatives; instead, they sell themselves to the electorate by marketing their distinc
aesthetic images through the mass media.
Thus the Hungarian party landscape was characterized by the dominance o
cultural politics.1 The central cleavage of traditionalism versus westernization was, to be
more exact, a cumulation of cultural and territorial cleavages. Yet the Hungarian citizens
themselves consistently maintain overwhelmingly materialist value orientations, and
socio-economic issues have consistently been both urgent and central. How has it been
possible for cultural politics to assume such primacy? How can we explain the weight o
history in shaping party formation and party competition?

The Prolongation of the East Roman Empire

As we learn from the work of Stein Rokkan and S. M. Lipset, the political history
of (Western) Europe with its critical junctures of the national and industrial revolutions is
the consequence of the collapse of the Roman Empire, more precisely of the West
Roman Empire. Rokkan identifies Europe with the domain of the Roman Catholic
Church after the schism of 1054. This excludes the Eastern areas in the domain of the
Orthodox Church, above all the Russian Empire, which was economically isolated from
the Western city belt and culturally encapsulated through the subjugation of the church
by the state. We are inclined to believe that the Russian Empire was in fact the successor
supranational colonial power of the East Roman Empire 2. Thus the formation of the
Soviet Union, and its eventual formal takeover of Eastern and Central Europe at the end
of World War II was the continuation and strengthening of Russian hegemony in the
area. But this hegemony, however powerful, never established itself smoothly over the
eastern territories of the former Roman Empire. Territorial consolidation, changing
external boundaries, and administrative and cultural penetration of constituent territories
were always problematic; ever increasing socio-economic dislocations, deprivation and
inequality made them more so. In a geographical space where the fit between states and
nations has always been unstable, conflicting claims of cultural, linguistic, religious, and
ethnic rights, i.e., cultura politics, quite naturally assumed ascendancy. Beginning as a
medieval imperial state, with large territories falling to the Turks and then the whole
country coming under Habsburg rule, producing a long string of failed uprisings and
revolutions, severely truncated when it lost a third of its population and two thirds of its
territory after World War I, allying with Nazi Germany out of revisionist aspirations tha
led only to occupation, falling under Soviet domination, and then subject to the cruel
repression of the national uprising in 1956, Hungary has had a history which has
inevitably heightened consciousness of ethnic vulnerability and fear of extinction. But it
must be added that this feeling is not a manifest collective memory. Such anxieties have
been largely restricted to one part of the cultural elite and have been in sharp contrast to
the pragmatic-materialistic attitudes of the population.

Exogenous Modernization and Dualist Social Structures

In Hungary, ever since the days of Joseph II, the enlightened Habsburg emperor,
the response to the advance of the West has been divided along cultural lines. The
division between those giving priority t “ the Fatherland” or to “ Progress” in the
beginning, between tradition and modernization in the more recent past, has always been
a cultural division. From Germany to Russia, cultural and political currents - Slavophiles
and Zapadniks, adherents and opponents of Sonderweg (a special national development
path deviant from the universal “ Western” -type of development) - emerged along thi
cleavage. This remained true even throughout the communist era. Opposition t
Communism was naturally organized and divided according to these complementary and
contradictory principles: human rights activist Sakharov and the writer Solzhenytsin in
Russia, the Polish Committee for the Defense of Workers (KOR) and the Church in
Poland, “ urbanists” and “ populists” in Hungary.
This centuries-old cultural struggle (Kulturkampf) along the lines of territorial and
cultural cleavages is rooted in a particular (Hungarian and regional) type of socia
structure in the course of (semi-)exogenous modernization. Hungarian sociologists and
historians describe this pattern by the term “ dualist social structures,” (Erdei 1987).
meaning the coexistence of functions between a feudal traditional sector (including
“ historica ” upper and middle classes, “ historica ” cultural elites) and a bourgeois
sector (capitalist upper and middle strata, urban intellectuals, and cultura elites) mainly
recruited from ethnic subcultures. This kind o dualist society is typical of backward
societies facing external challenges of capitalist development. As S.M. Lipset has shown,
cultural or ethnic minorities outside the national “ core group, ” groups of
“ sociological deviants” who have not been fully integrated into society, often play a
strong innovative role when such challenges must be met, particularly when the dominant
group is itself dominated by traditional values that contradict the requirements of
economic, cultural and political modernization. This type o “ non-organi
modernization” is, however, “ extremely vulnerable to political attacks from those who
maintain traditional values” (Lipset 1969: 98).
In Hungary the Jews first of all, then the German-speaking population and, to some
extent, smaller cultural-ethnic minorities such as the Armenians and the Greeks became
the equivalent of the innovative “ sociological deviants” described by Lipset. The
preconditions of the special role of Jewry in all fields of modernization were given in
their inherited cultural traditions conducive to embourgeoisement, in their presence in the
spheres of finance and commerce and in the “ free professions” - as a result of their
exclusion from the feudal and estate-centered society - and in their linguistic and cultura
assimilation. Their many contributions to Hungarian culture and science were also
important. Even more apropros was the consistent involvement of so many Hungarian
citizens of Jewish origin in radical progressive and leftist thought and politica
movements, especially manifest in the heav “ Jewish overrepresentation” in the failed
Soviet type Council Republic of 1919, continuing into the Communist Party leadership
between 1945-1956, and evident also as a very significant weight in the 1956 revolution
and in the later anti-regime opposition.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE PARTIES

Parties of the Dualist Period (1867-1918)
The formative period of a party system in Hungary can be dated to the years
around 1867, after the completion of the Austrian-Hungarian compromise following the
defeat of the 1848-1849 freedom fight. The period between 1867 and 1918, i.e. the end
of World War I and the collapse of the Dual Monarchy, can be characterized from the
point of view of our investigations as that of “ constitutional politics ” . The parties that
emerged were neither ideological nor class parties. The centuries-old cultural and
territorial divide between adherents of inward-looking identity based on nationa
traditionalism and those favoring outward-looking pro-W estern catch-up modernization
reappeared, dressed up as the constitutional struggle of parties over the issues of the
standing of Hungary in the Monarchy and of maintaining, restoring and/or extending
statehood.
In this struggle, the years themselves came to stand for partisan identities: 1867
meant standing for the status quo of the compromise; 1848 stood for the initial stage o
the freedom fight and bourgeois revolution as an organic continuation of the reform age
of the thirties and forties; 1849 indicated the second and final year of the national
struggle escalating to the dethroning of the Habsburgs.
Thus, the original faultline separated the governing Deá k Party (led by Ferenc
Deák, the architect of the compromise) from the pro-independence opposition defending
the principles of 1848 and 1849. However, as a political divide, ‘1867’ was not a realistic
cause for oppposition, inasmuch as no viable alternative was or could be proposed. On
the one hand, the Hungarian parliament had neither the right nor the power to bring
about change. On the other hand, given first the geopolitical situation of the country in a
buffer zone between a German eastward drive and an emerging Russian led Pan-Slavism,
plus the presence of increasingly secessionist ethnic minorities, the preservation of the
dualist Monarchy was the optimal and perhaps the only way to maintain the territorial
unity of the country and the power of the Hungarian historical ruling classes. This
situation inevitably led to contradictions in party politics and to schizophrenic attitudes
on the part of party politicians.
The first major cleavage-related modification of partisan identities and of the party
system took place in 1875. Taking advantage of an internal crisis in the Deák Party,
Kálmán Tisza, leader of the moderate ‘centre-left’ 1848 opposition party, now
established the Liberal Party. Th is reorganized party, supported by liberal nobilit
committed to economic modernization, took over the constitutional stance of the Deák
Part with the party itsel , and won - or, to be more exact, continued - control of the
government
With the emergence of this first state party, a kind of one-party-system evolved in
a period in which a number of unsettled issues remained on the political agenda: the
power conflict bertween Austria and Hungary in a context of the decline and crisis of the
Habsburg monarchy itself; the divisions among the nationalities within Hungary itself; the
issue of church vs. state; and the intensifying divisions between labour and capital. The
ruling party’s approach to all these problems was to insist that modernization was to be
accomplished without civil society, that the dismantling of feudal structures was to be
steered from above, namely by a group of the nobility possessing the privilege of
engagement in public life; that, particularly in a society in which bourgeois attitudes and
life-styles were most strongly represented by Jews and other ethnic minorities, there was
a need to reaccentuate liberal values as patriotic. Furthermore, given the 1867
compromise (between a weakening absolutism and a partly liberal mobility), certain
aspects of absolutism remained unchallenged, and there was a continuing strong
attachment to an essentially feudal center (Ger• 1995).
This last point implies serious consequences for democratic development including
the ‘normalcy’ of representative multi-party Parliamentarism with the rotation of
executive power. Thus we find the persistence of anti-liberal politics even in this period
of ‘national liberalism’. Specifically, anti-liberal traits were manifest in:
- the extremely limited selective system of suffrage. The proportion of voters in the
population was between 5.6% and 6.8% (in the Austrian part of the monarchy 27% of
the population had the right to vote) ( Sources of these and all following data in this
chapter: Rudai 1936; Földes and Hubai 1994; Bertényi and Gyapai 1992);
- an open (non-secret) ballot;
- the demarcation of electoral districts favouring the governing party;
- the regularity and frequency of frauds and bribery;
- the one-party-system regime of government.
This antidemocratism was legitimized by the political philosophy of the historica
ruling class, according to which Parliamentarianism, not popular representation,
constituted the essence of national sovereignty.
The practice of single party dominance continued: the ruling party (first the party
of Deák up to 1875, then the Liberal Party of Kálmán Tisza, reorganized by his son
István Tisza in 1910 under the name of the National Labour Party) was re-elected in
twelve of the thirteen elections held between 1867 and 1914. The governing party was
always strongly controlled by its leader(s) and always had a more than comfortable
majority ranging somewhere between 60 and 80%. Furthermore, the majority maintained
by the pro-compromise governing parties strongly contradicted the overwhelming
nationalist mood of the Hungarian population. These parties appealed only to modernist,
pro-bourgeois segments, to urban groups and - paradoxically - to non-Hungarians.
Geographical location had a clear impact on voting attitudes, but the most decisive
explanatory factor was nationality (or ethnicity) - which is why the ruling ‘nationa
liberals’ created, whenever possible, districts in which ethnic Hungarians were in the
minority.
The opposition Independence Party - heavily divided into rival factions - normall
won between 15 and 25% of the seats in Parliament. Political catholicism appeared in the
1890s with the birth of a conservative People’s Party which enjoyed 3-7% support.
Earlier, a single-issue Anti-Semitic Party also appeared on the scene; its program
demanding the deportation of Jews won it from 2 to 3% of the vote.
From 1905 on, progressive and pro-Western “ bourgeous radical ” politica
thinking was represented only by the Democratic Party with a single MP, and by the
leftist wing of the Independence Party. Six years after its formation in 1908, the
Association (later renamed “ Part ” ) of Smallholders, a pro-independence plebian
farmers party, won four seats in Parliament
From the end of the 1880s a moderate national conservative formation, known first
as the Moderate Oppositional Party, and then the United Oppositional Party, was also
present with oscillating support, eventually dropping to 4 percent, at which point it
joined the Liberal Party, and then, somewhat later, the Independent Party. The only
genuine mass party, the Social Democratic party - a party which emerged from the Party
of Non-voters established in 1878 and which was under the ideological influence of the
Austrian Socialists - acquired ever more political influence, and played an ever more
active social role. However, the struggle of the masses for political power remained
rooted in a relatively strong trade union movement and was excluded from Parliament
political alliance based on the demand for universal suffrage was forged with the
Independence Party in 1905. National and agrarian issues were not included in the social
democratic agenda and thus the expression of radical agrarian socialism took place only
in dissident movements outside the Parliamentary party system.

Parties in the Counter-Revolutionary Period (1920-1944)

The defeat of Austro-Hungary in World War I was followed first by the p eacefu
bourgeois democratic revolution symbolized by Count Mi hály Károlyi, formerly the
leader of the left-wing of the Independence Party and after 1913 leader of the party itself.
The revolutionary government consisted of leftist pro-independence politicians,
bourgeois radicals and social democrats. Unable to cope with external military pressure,
the terms of the peace treaty, a catastrophic economic situation, escalating popular
demands, an ever intensifying right wing counter-revolutionary movement, and tensions
within the new political bodies, the government soon ceded power to the “ Socialist
Party of Hungary ” , that is, to the Communists joined by the Social Democrats, now
dominated by their own left wing. The Leninist-type Hungarian Council Republic formed
by this alliance was crushed in mid-1919. Under foreign pressure the 1920 elections were
the first to be organized on the principles of the secret ballot and universal suffrage. They
were held in a traumatic emergency situation, in an occupied, shrunken and now
ethnically rather homogenous country. This was a transitory period, and the election was
openly negative in content: campaigning was focussed on attacking the Communists, the
Social Democrats, and the “ cosmopolitan Liberals” who were deemed responsible for
the crushing defeat of the country and the nation. Positive campaigning was limited to
the abstract, the cultural, and the ideological and consisted largely of calling for the
creation of “ a Christian and national Hungary ” with the overarching priority of
territorial revisionism.
The Social Democrats chose to boycott the elections, permitting other kinds o
political groupings to dominate the transition: Christian (mainly Catholic) and agrarian
(smallholders) organizations, each gaining approximately equal shares of parliamentary
seats. Following the one-party-system tradition a merger soon took place: a Christian
Smallholders’ Agrarian and Bourgeois Party, referred to and abbreviated as the United
Part , came into being. Political life and partisan identities were adjusted to the spiritua
climate of the so-called “ Christian-national course ” tied to the personality of Admiral
Miklós Horthy, Regent of Hungary. Core elements of this orientation were:
- national sovereignty, integrity and revisionism
- patriotic Christian thought with a historic mission to suppress revolutionary ideas,
liberalism, bourgeoi
radicalism, Marxism and - last, but not least - Jewish “ penetration” ,
- “ St Stephen’s Though ” : Hungarian national and cultural supremacy in the region
of the Carpathian Basin.
Count István Bethlen, the new head of the United Party and the prime minister as
of 1921, was committed to a moderate version of the “ Christian-national course ” , to
the restoration of historical Hungary under the leadership of the aristo cracy, with a
strong role for the traditional civil service, addressing the interests of large land-owners
and big capital and to a lesser extent those of the nationalistic middle classes including
smallholder components. In order to prevent destabilization by racist and populist
radicalism, he limited the suffrage and reintroduced open ballots outside big cities. Thus
transformed, the United Party gained 143 out of 245 seats in the 1922 elections. The left
wing opposition, represented by the Social Democrat and by the Liberals won only 10
and 8 percent of the vote respectively; racists and “ genuine Christians” on the far
right made similar scores. Leading an authoritarian party in an authoritarian regime,
Bethlen succeeded not only in political, but also in economic consolidation.
Economic crisis reached Hungary in 1931 and led to a crisis of the United Party.
Gyula Gömbös, formerly head of a small racist party and subsequently the leading figure
of the rightists within the United Party, became the Prime Minister and announced tha
Hungary would adopt a corporatist National Working Schedule based on Mussolini's
model. Deviating from Bethlen’s partly pro-British partly pro-Italian orientation, he
brought Hungary ever closer to Nazi Germany. Following Gömbös’s death in 1936 the
re-introduction of secret ballots speeded up tendencies of aggressive revisionism and
racism resulting in antisemitic legislation and the partial re-annexation of Northern
territories under Hitler’s patronage.
The 1939 elections reflected this trend. The radicalized “ state part ” , now
under the name Party of Hungarian Life, took a majority of 72% of the seats with 49%
of the votes. Parties of openly fascist orientation, first of all the Arrow Cross Party
collected 30% of the votes but only 19% of the mandates.
The major factor explaining this ultra rightist breakthrough was the ability to
combine elements of social demagoguery with racist and nationalist propaganda. Man
ruling party MPs sympathized with Arrow Cross ideas. The biggest losers of the left
wing opposition were the formerly re-organized Independent Smallholders, who lost
eleven of their twenty six seats. The Social Democrats dropped from 14 seats to 5. The
Liberals - supported mainly by the Jewish bourgeoisie of Budapest - kept their five seats.
The deepening involvement of the country in World War II in the hope o
territorial gains split the governing party into pro-Nazi and anti-war factions. This
development was reflected also in actual policies and led to German occupation in March
1944. Following a declaration of armistice in October by Regent Horthy - the Arrow
Cross Part with German support took over the government. It outlawed opposition
parties. However the Smallholders, the Social Democrats, the Communists and the small
left-wing Peasant Party, cooperated in an anti-fascist Hungarian Front in an effort t
organize resistance.

THE TRANSITION TO COMMUNISM (1945-1948)

The above described constellation of resistance movements provided the basis of

the post-war party structure from which the former governing state party and
(pro)Fascist formations were excluded. The basic political divide in the period between
1945 and 1948 was between forces more or less accepting the geopolitical status quo o
the country in the Soviet sphere of influence and those attempting to bring the countr
closer to the Western allied powers.
The trauma of Fascism and of the holocaust plus the fact that the country was
liberated - and occupied - by the Red Army brought about a situation in which originally
and potentially pro-Western social groups, welcoming the liberation of the country ,
defined themselves as leftists supporting either the Communists or the Social Democrats.
At this initial stage the leaders of these movements did not question the reality or the
desirability of the Yalta arrangements, accepting Soviet influence although disagreeing,
of course, regarding the exact measure of Hungarian autonomy and dependence.
The smallholders emerged in this bipolar framework as the right wing catch-all-
party of the majority of decidedly anti-Soviet and non-communist voters, attracting
support on an ideological basis of patriotism, clericalism and traditionalism. They were,
paradoxically, the party of the modern (non-communist i.e. free) capitalist West, of
private property, of pluralism and at the same time the party of pre-modern values,
identities and structures.
In the municipal elections of Budapest in October 1945 the smallholders won an
absolute majoirty of 50,5% against the United List of Workers (i.e. Communists and
Social Democrats), which won 43% of the vote. This trend was repeated a month later
in the national parliamentary elections, in which the smallholder vote rose to 57%. and
the Communists took only 17% of the vote, and the Social Democrats 17.4%. The pro-
Communist Peasants’ Party with a combination of anti-semitic-anti-German nationalism
and populist democracy gained 6.9%, while the only authentic pro-Western party, the
Bourgeois Democrats, won 1.6%.
The following years paved the way to Communist take-over. Relying on the
presence of the Red Army, enjoying leading administrative positions, including the
control of the police and the Army and having their own agents in the first ranks of the
coalition parties, the Communists undermined and split all alternative forces. In the
manipulated 1947 elections they emerged as the winning party with 22 percent. The role
of the weakened and disorganized Smallholders’ Party was partly taken over by the
Democratic People’s Party, a formation in the political tradition of Catholic parties
emerging as a second force . The emergence of this Catholic formation was a
consequence of the famous “ salami” tactics (slicing up of rival parties into ever
thinner parts) practiced by the Communists, a major object being the Smallholders,
weakened and fragmented, softened up, put under pressure, assaulted. Thus the People’s
Party came into being as an attempt to strengthen the anti-Communist opposition, and
took nearly a fifth of the vote. Overall results (in seats) were: Communists 100,
Smallholders (part of the CP lead “ alliance” ) 68, Social Democrats 67, Peasant’s
Party 36, National Christian Alliance 4, Democratic People’s Party 60, Independence
Party (right wing national) 49, Radical Party 6, Independent Hungarian Democratic Party
(agrarian, clerical) 18, Bourgeois Democratic Party 3. Altogether: 271 for the coalition
(including Smallholders) and 140 for the opposition. In spite of massive frauds,
restrictions and an increasingly oppressive climate, the Smallholders (although part of the
enforced coalition, but regarded as an anti-communist force), the People’s Party and the
other minor anti-communist opposition parties - togeth er won 55% of the vote.3
Reflecting the change in Soviet politics and the start of the cold war, the “ salami
tactics” of the Hungarian CP aimed at the gradual weakening, splitting and exclusion of
all rival parties was now replaced by the violent liquidation of the multi-party system.
The first target was the “ fraternal” Social Democratic Party in June 1948, when the
forced fusion of the two parties was accompanied by the expulsion of so-called righ
wingers. The Party of Hungarian Workers was created . With the Communist take-over,
“ other parties ” were not banned formally, they simply withered away, and for a while
one could find them even in the telephone book. Within a year the Stalinist one-party
dictatorship was fully established.

THE DUALISM OF MARKET SOCIALISM

As has been shown on the preceding pages, the defeat of the Hungarian fight for
national independence from Austria in 1849 was followed first by terror and then fro
the middle of the sixties by a compromise resulting in the dualist structures of the
Austro-Hungarian Monarchy with limited sovereignty, a measure of political pluralism
and the introduction of capitalist modernization. Something similar happened after the
anti-communist national revolution of 1956. Terror and retaliation were followed by
concessions. From the mid-sixties on, a compromise emerged resulting in a special type
of dualism. The main characteristics of this Kádárian compromise (J. Kádár was the
leader of the Communist Party under the name of Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party
were:
- a bargain with the great majority of the population in which the party leadership offered
(1) a kind of consumer socialism with modestly improving living standards; (2) a
socialist welfare state with social security and full employment; (3) a certain measure o
 informal administrative pluralism; (4) a restricted and manipulated cultural autonomy;
(5) non-interference in private lives; (6) a limited degree of personal freedom, first of a
in granting permissions to travel. The price demanded and - generally - received was
simple: non-interference in politics, respect for and at least a degree of lip-service to the
“ rules of the game” .
- the introduction of economic reforms without changing the political structures of the
one party system: market socialism
- shifts in the composition of economic and political elites: a diminishing weight and role
for ideological leadership; the emergence of an ever stronger and more influentia
pragmatic and technocratic managerial elite in the economy, in public administration,
and within the party itself (Szalai 1997).
Under these conditions, the political attitudes and - later - voting patterns of the
population remained determined by paternalism and by consumerist and welfare statist
expectations, and the scope for mass scale political mobilization remained narrow. At the
same time, however, the relative autonomy and continuity of cultural life contributed to
the early preparation and the later actua emergence of a bipolar party system built
around the carriers of two distinct and conflicting cultural traditions: the “ populists”
and the “ urbanizers” (later to become the core components of the initial hegemonic
parties of post 1989 cultural politics, the Hungarian Democratic Forum and the Alliance
of Free Democrats).
A limited administrative pluralism, cultural diversit were matched by economic
dualism. One sector of the economy of the 1970s and 1980s was rooted in
(post)totalitarian bureaucratic central planning, while the other was tied to the emerging
market economy. Statist political redistribution was complemented by market-based
distribution. (Bernhard 1996) The emerging dualism was reflected as well in the
differences between the values, life-styles and attitudes deeply rooted in ádárism and
those shaped by the gradual shift to capitalism .4 This dualism has remained a strong
cleavage-creating division in post-1989 politics; it explains the strength of the post
communist Socialist Party rooted in both sectors of society.
THE REVIVED RELEVANCE OF THE “ POPULIST” - “ URBANIZER ” -
DEBATE

The basic cleavage between identity-based traditionalism and Westernization, a

product of the contradictions in Hungarian state formation and nation building under the
pressure of exogenous modernization in a semi-peripheral buffer zone, determined party
structures and party competition between the 1860s and the 1940s as well as the absence
of mass democracy and the weakness o civil society. The special type of single party
system, the geopolitical context with its fatal threats for the country, and the continuing
accumulation of territoria , cultural and functional cleavages did not, however, allow for
a clear expression and translation of this fundamental divide in the party system. In the
initial stage of party formation on the threshold of regime transformation around 1989
oppositional forces defined their distinctive identities by reaching back to the tradition of
a confrontation which was primarily cultural but carried and expressed the basic
historical cleavage most clearly. They revived the debate of populists versus urban izers
which had surfaced in the 1920s and 1930s when both sides were in opposition to the
“ official” ideology and policies of the “ national-Christian course ” standing for the
continuity of so-called “ gentlemanly Hungary” , i.e., for the continuing supremacy o
the upper classes in social and political life. On the populists’ side i n this debate, carried
on among poets, writers and sociologists, three basic ideas had emerged:
- plebian (i.e. peasant) radicalis
- agrarian reform, meaning “ the elevation of the peasantry into the body of the nation”
- i.e., making the peasant the core of the national community
- a collectivis “ third road” for Hungary (implying for some a federation of East
European peoples) (Lackó 1992)
Given the fact of a dualist structure with a traditionalist feudal sector and a pro-
Western modern bourgeois sector with a high share of Jews in dominant positions, the
populists had represented the peasantry as an underlcass outside both sectors and had
insisted on the utmost priority of the survival of Hungarianhood, which they saw as
jeopardized by a modernization dominated by ethnically and culturally foreign elements.
 On the other hand, the urbanizers, Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals, had
defended the applicability of the universalist Western type social model, and were
supported by radicals, bourgeois democrats and social democrats. In the early 1930s
Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös, with his pro-Nazi and pro-racist inclinations, tried to ally
with the populists. Later, Communist politicians similarly, but with more success, flirted
with populist thinking.
The human rights centered Democratic Opposition from the late 1970s on may be
regarded as the reincarnation of the Western universalist urbanist tradition (even though
the core of this current of dissident intellectuals arose from among the school of Georg
Lukács). This is the historical background of the Alliance of Free Democrats, which was
to become the hegemonic party of the Westernization block in the post-1989 part
landscape.
The leading post-1989 party of the traditionalist side and of the national-Christian
government coalition (1990-1994) was to be the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF), a
party founded in 1987 from the milieu of the populist writers and intellectuals. Its
evolution was, however, strongly influenced by party leader and prime minister József
Antall who tried to combine the West European ideal of a German style Christian
Democracy with the moderate Hungarian “ national-Christian course ” tradition of
István Bethlen of the twenties. The inherent tension between radical populism and
national modernization not only helps us to understand the decline of the Hungarian
Democratic Forum from 1993 on; it also helps to explain the later division of the
national parties. into forces of identity-based endogenous modernization and of anti
democratic and and anti-modern 'social nationalism'.

REFERENCES
1. Here Lipset describes cultural politics as “ the relative dominance of cultural or value
factors and the superimposition of these factors on ohters.” (Lipset 1969: 93).
2. Idea put forward by P. Bakka (Bergen University).
3. Comparing the 57% of the Smallholders in 1945 and the results of the national
traditionalist parties in the 1990 parliamentary elections, i.e. 54% of territorial list
and 59% of the seats, MDF leader J. Antall interpreted this as a remarkable constancy
of traditionalist vote potential over a period of 43 years.
4. This type of situation prevails in a number of other post-Communist countries and
creates a social and political cleavage which we call the post-socialist or post-
communist cleavage. One side of this cleavage is usually represented by post-
(reform)-communist parties preserving old ‘Socialist’ values and attitudes while
defending the vested interests of the old-new ruling elite of emerging capitalism. This
explains the divisions, the identity crisis of the Hungarian Socialists, but also the
strength of this party: its embeddedness in both sectors of the present dual society.
 CHAPTER THREE

FROZEN CLEAVAGES AND CHANGING PARTIES

IN POST-COMMUNIST HUNGARY FROM 1989 TO MID-1997

1989 was a year of critical juncture in the history of East Central and Eastern Europe, and
Hungary was no exception. As Seymour Martin Lipset has pointed out, none of the ne
nations had effective civil societies in place, and it was difficult to institutionalize pluralist
policies. The need to form parties arrived suddenly and without preparation.vi
Party formation in Hungary began from the existence of small illegal or semi-legal
dissident networks on the one side and the former state party (divided into a reformist and an
orthodox wing) on the other. Reformers - renaming their party “ Hungarian Socialist
Party” in late 1989 - were in key positions, actively preparing the transition to democracy
and the market economy; “ genuine” Communists - carrying on under the old name
“ Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party” , by now just “ Workers’ Party” - lacked not onl
support, but the will and the means to control the transition. The weakness of the
Communists meant that the regime issue soon lost its primacy; the central cleavage became
the value-based division between the oppositional forces. In the formative period of the new
parties, the nationalists sought a compromise with some of the reform communists, while
liberal parties sought a radical change o elites; although in 1994 the ex-dissident liberal Fr
Democrats formed a coalition government with the Socialists facing a national and anti-
communist opposition. The new ascendancy of the cleavage between two elite groups within
what had been the opposition permitted the reemergence of a central and historically rooted
cleavage, the cleavage between Traditionalists and Westernizers.
The two dominant parties from the intellectual milieu, the Alliance of Free Democrats
(SZDSZ) and the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) were direct descendants of these two
parallel and competing currents as they had manifested themselves in the opposition of the
past ten to fifteen years. The MDF originated in a movement of national “ populist”
writers, historians and social scientists, held together by their anxiety about the “ destiny
problems of nationhood” - by which they meant the consequences of the Versailles/Trianon
peace treaty, the Hungarians in the diaspora, demographic decrease, cultural and ethnic
vulnerability, so-called“ national diseases” such as suicide, mental stress and the loss of
moral values and of solidarity. The original political orientation was a kind of plebian, quasi
leftist, “ national third road” concept, an orientation somewhere between “ Eastern”
communism and “ Western” capitalism. In the first year of its formation in 1987 this
movement was joined by many members and descendants of the former Christian
traditionalist middle classes. Following party leader József Antall (later prime minister),
traditionalist and Christian conservatism emerged as the dominant force in party politics,
although in bitter rivalry with radical populism.
On the other side, the SZDSZ was the direct continuation of the Democratic
Opposition of the 1980's, with the ethos of moral resistance against the regime (in contrast to
the semi-peaceful symbiosis of populist writers with nationally-oriented Communist part
leaders). The milieu of the hard core of the SZDSZ typically consisted of Budapes
intellectuals who had started their ideological careers as committed Marxists. Some of them
had been followers of Georg Lukács, making their long march to become human right
activists, revisionists and, finally, radical liberals. Many of them came from nomenklatura
families; many were of Jewish origin.
Parties like the SZDSZ and the MDF, led by intellectuals and drawing fro
subcultural elites, quickly became dominant in the new regime, and parties based on parties
from the past, such as the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats, and the Smallholders,
were forced to adjust. The reformist wing of the former state party, now the MSZP (Th
Hungarian Socialist Party), also acquired the traits of what we may call the milieu party type.
These parties each drew from specific cultural milieux. Their members shared analogous life
experiences and socialization patterns, had similar socio-cultural backgrounds and similar
aesthetic tastes. Although they often shared vague overarching value orientations, the specific
political priorities and programmatic ideas of members could and often did vary. This
aesthetisation of politics, looked upon as a typical post-modern development in the West, has
vii
been present from the very beginning of multipartism in post-communist Hungary
As a result, contradictory processes emerged as the parties, party alignments, and th
party system took shape. On the macro-political level, the trend of crystallization an
selection mainly along the cultural cleavage of Westernization versus traditionalism was
accomplished in a short time span. Of the 160 or more proto-parties registered, only six wer
able to overcome the threshold of 4% in 1990 and of 5% in 1994 (the same six in bot
elections: the ex-reform-communist Socialists; the Hungarian Democratic Forum, the
Smallholders, the Christian Democrats on the “ national” side, the Alliance of Free
Democrats on the Westernization side and the Alliance of Young Democrats originally on the
Westernization side, but by now on the opposite side of the major cleavage. However, insid
the parties severe conflicts were evident from the beginning between those whom we may call
movementist , eager to preserve the loose coalition character of the organization, an
partitocrat , those favoring a more bureaucratic and professional party organization, as well
as between groups and personalities linked to divergent political and ideological currents. As
a result, party leaders, as is typical in pre-mass parties, seek to hold themselves “ above
party.” (Sartori 1968)viii
In contrast to the heterogeneity of the individual parties and the prevailing pragmatic,
materialistic and consensus-oriented citizenry, the new party system thus emerged as the
confrontation of two value-based camps. The MDF won the 1990 election on the basis of it
presentation of itself as the “ Quiet Force,” promising stability and a non-radical approach
to the issue of regime transformation, and became the hegemonic party of the traditionalist
camp (comprising also the Christian Democrats and the Smallholders, although the latter,
becoming a radical and populist protest party, soon left the coalition). The Free Democrats -
together with the Young Democrats - were the key parties of the radical, liberal, anti-
traditional Westernizing camp, which also included the mainstream of post-reform-communist
Socialists. The two political camps manifested the age-old division between those for who
the supreme value was the maintenance of national identity and the survival of Hungarian
nationhood and those who put making a radical socio-cultural adjustment to the West and the
pursuit of catch-up modernization the central goal of political life: in short, Hungarianhood
versus civil society. On a continuum of values, the traditionalist parties focused on organic
solidarity, ethnocentric collectivism, cultural distinctiveness, homogenizing state authority,
clericalism and looking inward; the Westernizers believed in individualism, multicultural
diversity, rewarding performance, autonomy, the free market, secularism and looking
outward.ix
 Although all the neo-traditionalist parties demonstrated an emotional preoccupatio
with the “ trauma of Trianon,” they mainly treated the issue more as an issue of symbolic
politics than as an issue requiring revisionist action. Representative of this was the comment
by Prime Minister Antall in June 1990, “ I am a prime minister of fifteen million Hungarians -
in soul and in emotions.” (Hungary proper has a population of ten million.) The stance o
the Westernizing parties was that of Realpoliti : accept the administrative status quo, treat
the question of Hungarian minorities abroad as a human rights problem. The issue was
aggravated by nationalistic policies in neighboring Rumania, Slovakia and Serbia. As in the
past, the Hungarian nationalist elite could be interpreted as threatened by others, or a
threatening to others; this historical dilemma became a component of post-communist cultural
politics.
Parties, however, are not just prisoners of existent cleavages. They play an
independent role in cleavage translation, in policy making, in structuring the political space,
and in shaping each other. x While in many consociational democracies of Western Europe
political elites have been successful in overcoming divisive heterogeneity, the opposite has
been the case in Hungary, where political elites have tended to superimpose their own
subcultural divisiveness, based on latent or past cleavages, on a much less divided electorate
In the period between 1990 and 1994, during the rule of the national-Christian Lager (the
German term for “ camp” denoting a partisan bloc in the context of “ pillarizing” cultural
politics), the intensification of these cleavages, by the elites, led inevitably to the neglect or a
least the inadequate treatment of economic issues.
Prime Minister Antall, on the one hand, conscious of an historic mission, regarded
himself, his party and the national-Christian ideological community as forces destined to
restore the organic identity and continuity of the Hungarian nation, linking back to the
eleventh century and the state formation and nation-building efforts of Saint Stephen, the first
king of the country who converted his people to Western Christianity, established a stron
centralized state and made Hungary a part of “ Europe” . He pleaded for a spiritual
community of the nation as a whole. On the other hand, he also viewed his historic mission as
requiring that he do his best to foster Europeanization, the capitalist social market economy,
the rule of law, and the integration of Hungary into the EU and NATO. xi This dualism
contained not only the contradiction between a history-rooted veneration of nationhood and
the supranational or in some aspects post-national construction of Europe, but also the
incompatibility between the ideals of a spiritually united Christian national community and a
Western-type pluralist and multi-cultural democracy and its concomitant readiness to accept
different ideologies as legitimate.xii
POST-COMMUNIST KULTURKAM

The first years of post-communist Hungarian pluralism were thus characterized by a

political discourse, both within and outside of Parliament, overloaded with symbolic issues
and questions of national identity and historical continuity. The central theme became, “ who
is a genuine Hungarian?” The elites of the governing party were convinced they had not just
won a simple electoral victory but had been legitimized as a metaphysical entity, as
representing the fundamental nature of the nation. xiii Opposing forces, whether political,
journalistic, or academic, were consequently regarded as threatening the survival of the
nation. Using the German term Kulturkampf (cultural struggle), originally coined to describe
the conflict between state and church for the control of education in Western Europe around
the turn of the century, we can point to three central areas of party and public policy
competition in Hungary during this period. The governing elite was dedicated to the idea to
revive and to put into leading social positions a traditional Christian-national middle class
resulting in a measure of clientelist policies in the economy and the administration.

The control of the educational system

The identification of national curricula, the role and place of religious education, the
restitution of schools and universities as Church property, and the question of secular
education wer “ classical” Kulturkampf conflicts both on the central level and on the level
of local communities.

The control of the media

The existence of independent and often critical public and private media was
interpreted as the effort of “ media intellectuals” to damage the cause of the nation by both
the moderate conservatives and the radically nationalist currents of the governing parties
fighting for the “ occupation of the media” and seeking to purge public television and radio
of undesirable components. The radical nationalists gaining - at least, temporarily - leading
positions in public television and broadcasting went so far as to interpret the struggle as one
of “ Cosmopolitan liberal-bolshevik” intellectuals versus a “ genuine” Hungarian and
Christian media, thereby adding a distinctly antisemitic edge to the debate.
The efforts to control education and the media as means of indoctrination produced
number of problems. The principles of the rule of law and of checks-and-balances via the
counteracting forces of pluralist institutions were put at risk. Instead, an effort was being
made to impose a kind of social pillarization on the Hungarian citizenry, a pillarization which
could be found among the cultural elites, but not within the de-ideologized public. Initiatives
were undertaken - with relatively little success - to establish parallel, culturally distinctive civil
society networks, including professional organizations, especially (but not exclusively) on the
side of the traditionalists. “ One has to work constantly to change the soul, the mentality of a
people,” Antall declared. (According to his confessor, the Prime Minister's final words on
his deathbed in December, 1993, wer “ I wanted a Christian Hungary, only this has
xiv
future.” His success may be measured by noting that only one-sixth of all Hungarian
claim to live according to the teachings of the churches.)

The control of foreign policy

Foreign policy was an area in which the conflict between traditionalist and
westernizing tendencies were also marked. Although the ruling elite was strongly dedicated to
leading Hungary into the communities of Western European integration and NATO, they
constantly indulged in rhetorics of national sovereignty, drawing on a nineteenth century style
of nation-state romanticism and displaying a passionate preoccupation with ethnic solidarity.
Two events of the year 1993 could illustrate this almost schyzophrenic ambivalence. In May,
the “ Basic Treaty” between Hungary and Ukraine was to be ratified by Parliament. The
treaty prepared and negotiated by the government was a piece of Realpolitik and the
compromise contained in it soon became a kind of prototype being a precondition of th
Euro-Atlantic integration of Hungary. While the Hungarian side acknowledged the existing
post-Versailles state boundaries, the other side accepted the responsibility for granting
minority rights to ethnic Hungarians. In September, however, a quasi official reburial o
Admiral Horthy took place, of the pre-war Governor (Regent) of Hungary, the embodiment
of revisionist policies responsible for leading Hungary to Hitler’s side in the hope of restoring
Great Hungary. But the ratification of the Basic Treaty with Ukraine itself was a
contradictory process and led to a split between radicals and moderates in the traditionalist
camp, not only on the intra-party level (Democratic Forum versus Smallholders), but als
within the ruling party, resulting in a split of radical rightist groups from the MDF and in the
establishment of the racist Hungarian Truth and Life Party by István Csurka, former MDF
vice president. In this context, it was no surprise that the Parliamentary ratification of the
treaty could succeed only with the votes of the “ modernist” opposition parties. (After the
change of government following the 1994 elections, the new governing parties extended the
“ basic treaties” to Slovakia and Romania, under fierce attack from the national
opposition.)

Ambiguities in cleavage translation

In other areas of policy the conflict between the traditionalist ideological bias and the
determination to accept the requirements of capitalist transformation was more subtly but
nevertheless strongly at work, producing profound ambiguities. Three examples illustrate this
:
First, the process of de-etatization collided with centralizing, statist tendencies in
public administration and with political interventionism in economic and cultural domains.
The tendency of the MDF (and later the MSZP) to seek to establish itself as a state party was,
of course, in direct contradiction to the commitment to decentralization. xv
Second, any hopes for a free and spontaneous development of the privatizatio
process were seriously dampened by statist efforts to recreate a “ national-Christian middle
class.” Political patronage, including partial restitution and massive compensation to
selected groups, in spite of the influx of foreign capital, had unforeseen and often destructive
effects, both socially and economically. The anti-collectivist bias in agriculture resulted in the
creation of a massive small peasantry lacking the means for efficient farming. The formerly
successful sector, a combination of cooperative and household farming, became an area in
permanent crisis.
 Third, the practice of redistribution and growth-induction, disregarding equilibrium,
also made it impossible to set a clear cut public economic policy in pursuit of radical
structural reforms and deregulation all agreed were necessary. Ministers of finance came and
went, but there was a constant confrontation between a monetarist approach and a growt
orientation within the government.
Overall, the political record of the MDF government is complex. Certainly rea
progress was made in decisively important areas: the maintenance and consolidation of the
general framework of the rule of law and of the institutions of multi-party parliamentary
democracy, the steady progress toward a capitalist market economy, and the steps taken
toward integration into West European and North Atlantic supranational organizations.
Regime change became irreversible, no mean accomplishmen .
On the other hand, with respect to socio-economic public policies the
performance of this government can best be described as muddling through. The
economy did gain in relative autonomy despite attempts at political control. The mos
serious deficit was in establishing effective political linkage between citizens and
government - what we may call the failure of cleavage translation.
The language and style of communication resulting from elite consciousness o
having an historic mission were alien to the ordinary citizen. The vast majority of the
population had been effectively socialized in the years of János Kádár's “ goulash
communism” . They were strongly materialist, committed to the welfare state, and
deideologized. These attitudes and values, preferences did not change overnight
Ideological distances and fragmentation characterized the parties and their elites,
producing a kind of “ polarized multipartis ” in Sartori’s terms: “ a political system
characterized by centrifugal drives, irresponsible opposition and unfair competition
xvi
[which] is hardly a viable system.” . But these differences were not reflected in the
general public. The parties did not simply translate existing cleavages; they imposed thei
own. There was not simply a lack of correspondence, but a deep gap between a party
system based on cultural politics and an electorate hostile to ideological penetration ,
i.e., to the centrality of ideology. The evidence is clear: priorities of Kulturkampf policies
were rejected (places 14, 16, 18), while a pragmatic, materialist and welfare statist
attitude (1 to 5) prevailed (see Table below).
THE POST-SOCIALIST CLEAVAGE FAMILY AND THE ANTI-KULTURKAMPF VOTE

There were several stages on the way to the crushing defeat of the MDF and the
national-conservative parties in the 1994 elections. After the first year of confusion
(expressed in the widely supported taxi-drivers’ strike and the reversal of votes in the
1990 municipal elections), there was a period of public apathy regarding the parties.
Then the FIDESZ, the generation-based, at that time radical and pragmatic Alliance of
Young Democrats, an anti-party party, attracted popular support, and subsequently the
public turned to the Socialists (in what might be called an evolution from exit to voice).
The sweeping victory of the ex-Communist Socialists in 1994, plus popular support for
the coalition they made with the ex-dissident Free Democrats (the second strongest party
in the vote) demonstrated popular support for a mix of continuity and change. (In effect,
this was what the electorate had sought in 1990, when it accepted the MDF's claim tha
it would be the “ Quiet Force,” achieving change peacefully and carefully.)

Table
The assessment of the importance of political objectives (on a continuum from 1 to
5)

Average

1. Competent people should manage the economic affairs of the countr 4,77
2. To improve the standards of health care and educatio 4,75
3. To ease the burdens on the population resulting from economic 4,69
transformation
4. To decrease unemployment 4,62
5. To increase pensions and social benefits 4,62
6. To protect human rights and individual freedo 4,60
7. To struggle against crime with a police having efficient means and 4,59
authority
8. To decrease unjust inequalities between people 4,49
9. To stop the fall of morality 4,46
10. To protect the environment more efficiently 4,35
11. Efficient representation of Hungarian interests abroad 4,22
12. To grant the right for abortion to women 4,19
13. To promote private enterprise and free market 3,97
14. To strengthen national feeling 3,71
15. To speed up privatization of state companies 3,22
16. To remove ex-CP members from leading functions 3,19
17. To grant further functioning for non profitable enterprises and mines 2,82
18. To increase the influence of religion and the churches 2,73

Source: Kurtán et al., ed. 1993. “ Median,” in Magyarország Politikai Évkönyve

(Political Yearbook o Hungary), p. 650.

The 1994 vote contained a two-fold message: a refusal of ideologically determined

policy-making (by this time the Socialists were seen as “ professional” and “ pragmatic,”
not rooting their platform in the cultural cleavage) and a moderate support for
Westernization. The voters were not interested in making the time-trip back into the twenties
and thirties; a shorter trip into the late eighties had greater appeal. The well-known faces and
familiar style of the ex-Communists offered a sense of stability and security, after the
ideological turmoil of the first post-1989 government and its policies. Returning them to
power gave the voters a sense of restoration of continuity and security, a conviction they need
not live in shame for having long accepted Kádárian “ goulash communism” - their ow
biographies were relegitimized.
The sweeping victory of the Socialists in 1994 revealed the existence of a set of deeply rooted
post-socialist cleavages in the society and the economy. The post-socialist cleavage famil
“ Kádárian Communism versus emerging capitalism” can also be described in the terms of
a dual society (or social dualism) split into a sector rooted in state socialism and a sector o
capitalism in-the-making. Beginning form the middle of the sixties a special type o
authoritarian regime emerged, based on th “ Kádárian bargain” : one-party-rule and
external dependence were to be accepted by the population in exchange for increasing living
standards, social security, economic reforms, limited cultural and administrative pluralism and
tolerance of “ privacy” . A technocratic elite became increasingly dominant in politics and
in the economy. Concomitantly a process of petty-embourgeoisment of significant strat
emerged tied to a market-oriented “ second economy” . In preparing the political and
economic regime change, the political arm of this technocracy played a leading role in the
shape of the reformist wing of the state party and later of the ex-communist Socialist Party
Following the 1990 elections, this “ late Kádárian technocracy” could not onl
keep but also decisively strengthen its dominant position in the economy; in the political field,
however, it was more or less marginalized. The sweeping victory of the Socialists in 1994
expressed the response of broad segments of the electorate irritated by the decrease of living
standards accompanied by a Kulturkampf neglecting socio-economic issues. The demands for
social security, for welfare and consumption were channeled into a Kádárian nostalgia and
into votes for the familiar faces and styles offered by the ex-Communist party dressed in social
democratic colours.
The Kulturkampf antecedents forged the alliance of Socialists and the Free Democrat
originally representing the opposite sides of the post-communist Kádárian cleavage. This
resulted in permanent coalition tensions, but also in more and more adjustment and
assimilation of the Free Democrats with the price of questioning their identity.
The late Kádárian technocracy as a kind of a new ruling class o “ managerial
capitalism” (I. Szelényi) has a double face. Partially, it is an antithesis of bourgeois political
democracy favouring informal decision-making and non-public bargains, and the spread of
political patronage, but equally committed to capitalist marketization and to radical economic
Westernization. It plays a steering role in socio-economic transformation continuing the
historical path of semi-exogenous modernization.
Although the leadership of the MDF with the removal of vice-president Csurka did
break away from populist “ volkisch” type radicalim in 1993, the change came too late and
too incompletely to save the party. The fear of radical decommunization and of increasing
fascistoid and antisemitic tendencies mobilized segments of the electorate to a protest vote
and contributed to a rapprochement of the MSZP and the SZDSZ on the levels both of the
 xvii
party elites and of their supporters. Beginning with the Democratic Charta movement
against radical rightism and resulting in a coalition government of Socialists and Free
Democrats, these developments started to push FIDESZ, unwilling to ally with the Socialists,
over to the nationalist-conservative side of the dominant cultural cleavage.
The first years of regime change after 1989 had frustrated the majority of the
population. Neither the introduction of pluralist democracy nor the transition to a capitalist
economy had made everyday life easier or more secure. On the contrary, the price for
freedom appeared to be insecurity, a decline in material well-being, and the rise of inequalities.
The public was irritated by the focus of the government, parliament and the parties o
Kulturkampf rather than socio-economic issues. Many believed that if the ideological and
cultural issues could be set aside, everyday life would automatically be improved.

Shock therapy as cleavage-creating policy

The reaction of the socialist-liberal government established in1994 to the over-
politicization of the previous regime and its efforts to revitalize a fictitious national-Christian
middle class was to adopt a conscious strategy of de- politicization, especially of the public
media, as well as a technocratic problem-solving approach to public policy. The commitment
to rational technocratic calculation and engineering assumed the qualities of an ideology and
was also designed to be an effective way to legitimize the increasing power of the post-
communist managerial elite.xviii
Technocratic crisis management became particularly important in March, 1995, after
9 months of stalemate owing to intra-coalition conflict as well to conflicts within the senior
coalition partner. the policy package of Lajos Bokros, minister of finance, was adopted, an
became the very essence of government policy. The most important components in this
“ stabilization program” were the stimulation of exports by currency devaluation and
import duties; streamlining social and health services; giving up universal allowances;
introducing residual means-tested social transfers; limiting collective and personal
consumption; imposing wage restraint, reducing spending and employment in public
education, in public health, and in scientific research and cutting back the public sector acro
the board. Thus, a general monetary restriction was pursued with the aim of restoring
financial equilibrium as the precondition of growth.
 Was this shock therapy related to the question of political cleavages? The answer is
complex and multidimensional:
First, the Bokros package as a public policy issue of rational choice had nothing to do
with any structural cleavage. It was, rather a consequence of exigencies without viable
alternative, a Sachzwang. Hungary's cumulated public debt and the continuing disequilibriu
resulting from the economic policies of the Communist past (and, to some extent, of th
previous government) left the new government no alternative.
Second, the package represented a basic act of economic regime transformation, and
as such could be related to the set of post-socialist cleavages. As I. Szekeres, leader of the
Socialist parliamentary group, said, the end of the Kádárian regime can be dated March 12,
1995.
Third, the package followed the logic and the necessity of commodification, the
extension of market and commodity relations, as the basic principle of a capitalist market
economy. As Bokros himself pointed out, the purpose was to prevent having secondary
income redistribution by the state distort the primary income redistribution by the market.
Here we see a basic political division in capitalist systems, the classical social democrati
cleavage which originated in the conflict between labour and capital. It is the conflict between
forces interested in policies of decommodification, the weakening and the limitation of the
logic of the market and of commodity production i.e., in a political redistribution against the
market, and forces interested in the “ undisturbed” functioning of the market, and th
extension of the market logic to society as a whol . On another level, this can be seen as the
conflict between mass democracy with its objectives of inclusion, popular participation and
equality and the class based inequalities of “ pure” capitalism in which the functioning o
market allocation is allowed to lead to exclusion. The Bokros package adopted an openly
Hayekian philosophy, rejecting social citizenship as morally unjust.
Fourth and finally, the Bokros package can be seen in international terms as stemming
from a typical center versus periphery cleavage. The economic and political penetration by
supranational decision-making centers is manifest in the intervention they made to ensure that
their priorities of economic and social policy-making were respected in Hungary. IMF
demands and the impact of the Maastricht convergence criteria were of decisive importan
for the government in its resolution to adopt the package even at the possible cost o
jeopardizing its legitimacy and its chances of reelection. Furthermore, foreign interference
tended to produce a relevant domestic political cleavage: acceptance of dependency (“ what
is good for the IMF is good for Hungary” ) versus a quasi anti-colonialist defense of the
national interest. This cleavage was apparent in the division between the government and the
opposition, but also within the individual parties, and, increasingly, within the general
population.
In sum, the introduction of the Bokro “ stabilization package” shifted the
fundamental cleavage in Hungarian politics toward a socio-economic commodification
cleavage. The formal centrality of the cultural divide combined with an ideological and
political anti-post-communist cleaveage in party politics remained, however, persistent.
“ Class struggle” became dressed up as anti-communist and national Kulturkampf.

The effects of the commodification cleavage on the party system

The shift in cleavages, as defined by party elites, had a strong and sometimes
surprising effect on intra-party and inter-party cleavages, particularly among the out of power
traditionalists. In response to the Bokros program, the opposition adopted a quasi social-
democratic, even Keynesian and welfare-protectionist line of attack on the government.
Ferenc Kulin, a moderate conservative, originally a leading politician of the MDF, sought to
justify this change of policy profile by admitting, first, that the central ideas of patriotic
traditionalist parties and the actual political attitudes of the electorate could not be reconciled:
“ The national awareness of present Hungarian society is not in a state in which it could be
mobilized.” On the other hand, he has argued, fighting against the policies o “ adjustment
to a world market dominated by multinational companies (...) and globalized media power ”
can be a practical way of working against “ anti-national policies.” He even achieves a
nationalistic variant of the decommodification argument prevailing in Western center-left
parties: “ (...) economic policy which does not measure the far-reaching social effects of each
xix
of its steps is anti-national.”
The only party which was unambiguously and whole-heartedly in favor of
commodification and therefore of the stabilization package was SZDSZ, the Alliance of Free
Democrats. Although the program was harmful to the interests of the SZDSZ middle-class
clientele employed in or dependent upon the public sector, it seemed to be compatible wit
the liberal ethos and with the original radicalism of the party elite on the question of regime
change. The more radical segments of the nationalist opposition were quick to seize upo
this stance as a further sign that the SZDSZ is the “ arch enemy,” cosmopolitan, and
“ non-Hungarian” , thereby occasionally seeking to split the coalition. Similar argument
were sometimes made within the MSZP as well.

The identity crisis of the Socialists

The Socialist Party became the key actor in Hungarian politics, but at a cost o
serious problems of identity, strategy and maintaining electoral support. The landslid
electoral victory of this formerly ghettoised “ successor” party - taking 33% of party list
votes in the first round and winning almost all constituencies in the second - the Party became
the first popular catch-all party in Hungarian political history. It proved to be the best
organized party in the country with a strong active membership and a reservoir of
professional leaders on several - national and local - levels. Overcoming its quarantine-lik
isolation of 1990-1991, during which time it was predominantly an urban intellectual party, it
succeeded first in attracting blue-collar workers in industrial centers and then moving out to
capture support from the whole spectrum of Hungarian social stratification and valu
orientations.xx The party has especially strong support in the older age groups.
However, in spite (or perhaps due to) its broad character as a catch-all party, the
MSZP brought instability to itself and to the party system. Being the gravitational center of
politics it provided “ coalition linkage” , it collected the votes of blue-collar workers and
pensioners and of managers, administrators, and the cultural elite; it appealed to winners and
to losers, to the urban and to the rural population, to the traditional trade unions and to
international and domestic monetary institutions. But it was unable to offer a single consistent
identification.
The mainstream of the MSZP found its place on the pro-Western side of the basic
cultural cleavage of Hungarian politics, although the party is not rooted in that divide. It has a
troubled identity: as the successor party it attracts the votes and sympathies of former
members of the Communist Party; as a party committed to the basic values and principles o
Western social democracy plus as the party of late-Kádárian goulash communism, it attract
the support of the losers and the adherents of the welfare state. Strong and large groups o
the economic elite are behind the Socialists. The MSZP had the strong organization and
technocratic leadership style of the state party of the pre-1989 period. It was and it is a catch-
all party along several dimensions, eg., according to sociological criteria (region, profession,
milieu), according to pressure group memberships, according to personal ties and networks,
and according to ideological rivalries (trade unionist, libertarian, social liberal, classical social
democratic, nationalist, Marxist and bureaucratic-technocratic). Not surprisingly, following
the 1994 electoral victory and formation of the government, tensions within the part
increased. Not all the (often conflicting) electoral expectations could possibly be met,
economic and financial constraints limited policy alternatives, and the strategic and ideological
options of inner-party groupings and personalities became ever more divergent.
In the first nine months of government the inner-party tensions focusing on economic
policy and on the relationship between the coalition partners made decision-making on crucia
policy issues all but impossible. Some time following the adoption of the Bokros stabilization
package, the debate within the party lead to a delicate but fragile balance. This was expressed
by Ferenc Kósa (who belongs to the nationalist-minded anti-capitalists), “ my sense of
xxi
justice gives me no peace; a victorious party cannot puts its values into a deep freeze. ”

Patronage and dealignment

From late 1996 on, the relative stability of the Hungarian party system became
increasingly questioned by the electorate and by sharpening centrifugal movements in the
individual parties. This destabilization was due to the policy record of the government under
Prime Minister Gyula Horn and the corresponding changes in public opinion. The
government strategy for financial consolidation has been successful, the equilibrium of the
economy has substantially improved, public spending has decreased. The confidence o
international financial institutions and of foreign capital appears to have been restored. The
social costs of these improvements were, however, considered by some to be too high. Real
personal income declined by 15 to 16 percent in the first two years of the new government,
income inequalities were growing, the middle strata were losing buying power, and the
welfare system, particularly in the domain of health care, showed alarming signs of financial
collapse. By fall 1997 there were some very modest signs of a relative improvement in
general living standards, without the trend of growing inequalities changing.
 General discontent, manifested by a score of 75% “ pessimistic” in the 1996
Eurobarometer survey, was aggravated by the issue of corruption. A political patronag
scandal involving an individual brokerage fee of 8 million DM paid by the State Privatizatio
Agency was seen by many as the mere tip of an iceberg, and the issue was exploited by th
opposition parties, first of all by FIDESZ, and important in shaping popular political attitudes.
Former SZDSZ leader János Kis has written, “ The authority of democratic institutions has
touched bottom; in the whole of East Central Europe, it is the weakest in this nation. ” He
believes the “ late-Kádárian bargain” has failed and blames the coalition partner. Ex-
functionaries promised to maintain basic social security benefits in order to secure leading
positions in which they practice clientelism and corruption to an extent that makes a mocker
of their promise. Corruption, the parasitical penetration of a weak state by interest groups,
and the interconnections between the public service and big capital are linked to the poor
performance of the state and the decay of public services.xxii
The self-defense of the coalition parties (the Free Democrats having been shown to be
involved in the scandal as well as the Socialists) was to remind the opposition parties they did
no better. Surveys indicated that public opinion reacted not only by withdrawing support
from the government, but also by questioning the legitimacy of democratic institutions,
particularly parliament and the parties. Mass protest against this “ pornography of politics”
threatened to override and/or distort the significance of social and cultural cleavages as it has
in a number of other pluralist nations (Italy, Belgium, Austria, Spain, Iceland and Japan
among others).

Mutually reinforcing cleavages

This challenge of legitimacy strongly affected the parties. Within the MSZP the ability
of party leader Gy Horn to use his personal blend of autocratic leadership and tactica
mediation to contain intraparty groups and discourage actual or potential rivals had not
however been weakened and his authority prevailed. Growing international prestige, healthy
macro-economic indicators and the halt in the decline in living conditions seemed to restore -
at least partially and temporarily - confidence for the Socialists and their leader.
Organizational rivalries among party bodies and ideological confrontations were dampened in
the name of discipline and loyalty.
 The SZDSZ also came to face serious challenges. It suffered from a loss of party
identity and autonomy as junior partner in coalition with a party of a very different political
culture, yet was not been willing to risk isolation outside the government. A party with a
heritage of moral resistance, it found itself involved in dubious affairs. It had to but was not
able to make the difficult choice between the prevailing economic reductionism and late-
Kádárian distortion of liberal policies versus standing up for its declared republican ethos.
And finally, its middle class clientele became alienated by the restrictive monetarist policies
with which the party was associated.
Thus, as to the cleavage basis of the politics and policies of the governing -
simultaneously “ leftist” (from the point of view of culture) an “ rightist” (from the
point of view of the economy)- parties, with the Socialists reasserting their dominant positio
and the Free Democrats losing their authentic and independent identity, we witnessed a
syndrome of mutually reinforcing cleavages. Westernization, resulting from a cumulation of
cultural and territorial cleavages was the decisive option. Its social content was externally
determined, a logical consequence of the centre-periphery relation: it was the victory o
commodification representing the actual interests of the economic elites, of the winners of th
transformation. Due to the circumstance that the new managerial ruling class had its origin in
the late-Kádárian technocracy, Westernization and commodification were intertwined with
the post-Socialist cleavage side. However, a considerable number of old and middle-aged
“ leftist” voters remained loyal to the Socialists, even if their interests were hurt and their
values disregarded in public policies.
On the side of the traditionalist parties two contradictory tendencies emerged. The
first tendency was a corresponding cumulation of cleavages, a response to the Westernization
bloc: decommodification tied to nationalist-clericalist positions and to anticommunism. An
inherent consequence was the radicalization of party competition. The second tendency was a
divide between a more militant, demagogic wing and a more pragmatic wing, amounting to a
bipolarity. The rivalry between “ Torgyánism” as “ social nationalism” , the program of
demagogic antiliberal populism and social redistributionism represented in 1995 and 1996 by
József Torgyán, leader of the Smallholders and the more moderate approach of the Young
Democrats (FIDESZ) lead to a crumbling of the other parties of the traditionalist-nationalis
opposition. Power conflicts emerged and escalated both in the Forum and the Christian
Democrats. In January 1996 half of the Parliamentary group of the MDF left the party and
formed the moderate and pragmatic Hungarian Democratic People’s Party (MDNP), in
response to the victory of the more populist wing in the Forum. Things, however, changed
very soon. The MDNP remained isolated and without any significant popular support. The
Forum also stepped upon the road to failing the 5% threshold. While FIDESZ - according to
János Kis, former leader of SZDSZ - was occupying the political space of the MDF of the
early ninetiesxxiii, MDF (i.e. the rest of MD ) concluded an alliance with the Young
Democrats. The struggle for power and for ideological “ purity” was even more self-
destructive for the Christian Democrats. The scandalous victory of party leader György Giczy
standing even closer to the fascistoid Party of Hungarian Truth and Life than to J. Torgyán'
Smallholders was followed by the self-liquidation of the parliamentary group of the KDNP:
the moderate majority of Christian Democratic MP’s joined FIDESZ. These developments,
however, lead us to a new chapter in party competition in Hungary.
 SUMMARIZING CONCLUSIONS

Having confronted the experiences of 1o years of multipartism in Hungary with the classical theory of
political cleavages we underline the following points:
• The evolution of the Hungarian party system confirms the classical sequence of European
cleavage formation with the initial and decisive emergence of identity-based territorial and
cultural divides, with their dominance over socio-economic divides followed later by the
appearance of economic cleavages.
• The salient manifestation of the cumulation of cultural and territorial cleavages in the part
system corresponds clearly with the cyclical movement in the framework of the Rokkanian
scheme demonstrating now globally the centrality of a national-supranational divide.
Hungarian party competition seems to reflect and even to anticipate new developments of
Western party systems.
• There are real historical alternatives expressing different conceptions of modernisation, of
nationhood and of geopolitical location represented by the parties. These alternatives are olde
than the Hungarian electorate, but they deviate from the mainstream in Western Europe: we
find no direct link between changing parties and frozen alternatives. This is a consequence
of discontinuity, of the totalitarian and authoritarian rules prior to 1989.Thus, we have to do
with a particular form of 'freezing'. For Rokkan and Lipset, party alternatives and the part
system itself freeze. In Hungary and in some other ECE countries parties, partisan identities
change in rather short intervals, parties and party structure are unstable and fluid. But the
alternatives contained in the cleavage structure are amazingly stable: not the party system,
but the cleavage structure is frozen. In the formation process of the parties (1988-89), in the
subsequent three elections from 1990 to 1998, the same cleavage sets have mattered and
structured party competition, namely: the three cleavage families of Westernization vs.
traditionalism, post-communism vs. anti-post-communism and marketization,
commodification (winners) vs. welfare statism, i.e. decommodification (losers). While in
Western democracies parties are rooted in cleavages, to be more exact, are tied to distinct
cleavage sides most Hungarian parties are eithe in search for social and cultural cleavages to
embark upon, even crossing the cleavage lines, or are rooted in opposite cleavage sides. The
evolutionary process of party politics in Hungary, inspite all contradictions, goes in the
direction of more structure, more system.
• This special freezing of alternatives and cleavages has, however, taken place in the context of
a very much open and available electoral market . This deviance from the Rokkan-Lipset
freezing pattern is the unavoidable consequence of the long discontinuity of the party system,
the lack of traditions of mass democracy and the unstable interest structure of civil society.
 Although there are some sociological and demographic explanatory factors of party support,
the overall tendency is volatility, an extremely low degree of party identification coupled with
an inherited non-participatory political culture with apathy or even hostility towards parties.
Parallel with the tendency of realignment, i.e. clearer poles, and of alignment on the level of
political actors, we also observe a massive dealignment on the level of (non-)voters.
• Due to the strong economic, social and political positions of the post-communist elites and
surviving value orientations in the electorate, 'the definition of the rules of the game' as a
systemic issue is expressed by the salience of a 'post-communism - anti-post-communism'
cleavage family. It cannot be deducted from the Rokkan-Lipset scheme, and by its very nature,
cannot become a long-enduring historical divide, can be supposed to fade away. That
development might bring about a restructuring the cleavage basis and the party system itself
in the non-distant future.
• The taming of capitalism, the political regulation of the market with a political mobilisation
along a commodification - decommodification axis is a crucial point of democratic
consolidation and legitimacy. Following from the freezing of the Hungarian political cleavage
structure in the phase of the dominance of the cultural-territorial and post-communist
cleavage families, the increasing importance of this socio-economic divide is coupled with its
absorption or inclusion into the other two cleavage families.
• The post-1989 evolution of the Hungarian party system has brought about no political
mobilisation along the line of a classical labour-capital class cleavage. Instead, we have
observed the following attempts for bringing the welfare statist decommodification cleavage
in:
- coupling it with the post-communist cleavage,
- coupling it with the defence of national identity,
- coupling it with the religious cleavage,
- coupling (its radical variant) with an aggressive and racist social nationalism.

Cleavage structure in Hungar

1. The family of territorial and cultural cleavages

Traditionalist forces stress historical continuity, Hungarian nationhood, favour community ove
society, are for strong authority, strong church. Their value orientations are more particularist than
universalist, they have an inclination 'to love the rural', even if they are urban
Westernizers are outward-looking, for catch-up modernisation, they favour individualism, multi-
cultural diversity, they stress secularism and human rights.
2. The family of post-communist cleavages
This set of cleavages has several dimensions
 - an ideological dimension of anticommunism which can be based either on national, religious
identities or on the universalism of individual human rights and rationality;
- a political dimension expressed in the relationship to the Socialist Party looked upon as the
successor party;
- a power dimension of competing elites and of the re-definition of the rules of the game outside
and inside politics;
- a structural dimension reflecting the symbiotic dualism of the present society with a secto
rooted in late communism and a sector of emerging capitalism,
- an emotional and biographical dimension with a population split into two halves: one half who
feel they lived better in the last years of 'real socialism' and another half thinking differently.
3. The family of socio-economic cleavages
With economic transformation progressing and with an overwhelmingly materialist electorate this set of
cleavages has become central, but the early freezing of the party system structured along the above
mentioned two cleavage sets is still complicating the clear translation of this divide into programmatic
and public policy alternatives. One pole of this cleavage family is radical commodification with a high
speed and broad extension of marketization, privatization, a primary market distribution of wealth and
incomes with marked inequalities, the other is a certain measure of decommodification with extended
welfare statism. The continuing uncertainty about (or neglect of) the de-commodifation (i.e. welfare
statist) position in the cleavage structure of party competition can strain the legitimacy of the party-
system.

Manuscript closed: June 18 1998.

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i
An extensive bibliography of S. Rokkan's works is contained in Rokkan 198o, Flora 1981 and 1983.
ii
Although in the last twenty years - referring to the emergence of a post-materialist - materialist divide
(Inglehart), to the appearance of a new type of right-wing radicalism, some authors speak of unfreezing
(Cotta: 103), while others defend the freezing hypothesis. ( Bartolini-Mair)
iii
Our scheme of the Hungarian cleavage structure was originally elaborated in early 1990, before the
first free elections. (Márkus G. 1990,1992) It stands close to the concept of C. Offe (Offe 1996).
iv
This idea of a dualist structure as a cleavage basis was put forward by M. Bernhard.
v
See also the party descriptions by A. Körösényi (1998: 76-88) and by A. Ágh, Z. Ferencz, S. Kurtán, L.
Szarvas and G. Török in Népszabadság, March 21, 28, April 4, 11, 18, 25 and May 2 1998.
vi. Lipset, S. M. 1993. The Social Requisites of Democracy Revisited. Presid. Address ASA, Manuscript.
vii. Harvey, D. 1994. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge-Oxford.
viii. Sartori, G. 1968. “ Political Development and Political Engineering,” in Public Policy, no. 17: 261-298.
ix. Márkus, G Gy.. 1994. “ Parties, Camps and Cleavages in Hungary,” in M. Waller et al.,ed., Social
Democracy in a Post-Communist Europe. London, pp. 154-170.
x. Sartori op.cit.
xi. Révész, S. 1995. Antall József távolról. Budapest.
xii. Lipset, S. M: 1959. Political Man. New York, p. 84.
xiii. Révész op.cit., p. 121.
xiv. Révész op.cit., p. 120.
xv. Ágh, A. 1994. The Revival of Mixed Traditions: Democracy and Authoritarian Renewal in East Central
Europe. Budapest Papers on Democratic Transition, no. 92.
xvi. Sartori op.cit.
xvii. The Democratic Charta as a political movement initiated in August 1991 by PEN President Györg
Konrád (member of SZDSZ) and soon supported by thousands of liberal, social liberal and socialist
intellectuals was directed against the Kulturkampf radicalization tendencies in the MDF government.
Peaking from 1991 to 1994, it served as an umbrella organization to various demands:
- a reawakening of civil society drained by party pluralism;
- an opposition to authoritarian tendencies expressing a democratic consensus;
- an experimental field for a liberal-socialist political alliance.
(see: Bozóki, András. 1997. “ The Politics of Movement-Intellectuals after the Regime Change: The
Democratic Charta in Hungary,” in Politikatudományi Szemle, no.1: 237.)
xviii. Szelényi, I. 1994. “ Menedzser-kapitalizmus,” in Magyar Lettre International, vol. 19: 21-29.
xix. Kulin, F. 1995. “ Mitõl nemzeti?,” in Magyar Nemzet, 19. Sept.
xx. This seems to confirm Sartori’s thesis that the party system becomes structured in response to the rise of a
mass party although that author’s corollary that such a party also contributes to the structural consolidation of
the party system has not yet been apparent. (Sartori op.cit.)
xxi. Magyar Nemzet, 21. Oct. 1995.
xxii. Kis, J. 1996. “ A rendszerváltásnak vége,” in Beszélô , August-September, pp. 4-10.
xxiii. J. Kis op.cit.