Aide’s Criticism Seen Aimed at Hungary Chief

A Communist Party official launched a thinly veiled attack on Hungary’s veteran leader Janos Kadar on Saturday, calling for reforms to loosen the grip of the aging leadership on the country’s top offices.

“That is how we can stop the counterproductive selection process which allows people who are unfit to sit in their leading positions forever,” Janos Barabas, deputy head of the party’s propaganda department, wrote in the government daily Magyar Hirlap.

Hungarian and Western analysts said publication of the article indicated a severe split between reformers and conservatives supporting Kadar, the 75-year-old party general secretary who has held power for more than 30 years.

One Budapest journalist said the article must have been approved by Premier Karoly Grosz, 57, Kadar’s most likely successor.

Barabas said Hungary must rid itself of Stalinist structures, the media must be unrestricted and people free to pursue their own activities. He added that the authorities must be allowed no secrets except in the defense field.

‘Only Way’ for Control

“That is the only way to organize social control of the top authorities,” Barabas said in the article.

Barabas did not name Kadar but criticized the phrase “Change and Continuity”--one of the general secretary’s slogans.

“Now the emphasis must be on change, not continuity. An exaggerated adherence to continuity endangers public trust and weakens public consensus,” he wrote.

The party must act “within the next few months” to renew itself and political institutions as well as ideology, he said. Social reforms are needed to accompany economic reforms, he added.

Kadar seems to take a less serious view of Hungary’s situation and the urgency of change.

“There is no crisis in Hungary,” Kadar said after meeting businessmen on Thursday. There is a need for political institutions to be reformed, but that will take time, he added.

Speculation has been rife that Kadar, installed by the Soviet Union after the Hungarian uprising was crushed in 1956, might resign at a special party conference in May.