For Hungary, Reform or Perish?

A young woman sat in one of the back rows in a meeting of the reformers of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, as the nation’s Communist Party is known. She leaned forward, listening to the words of Hungary’s leading Communist liberals, now and then taking notes in a tidy little notebook.

When one of the speakers noted that it was time for politics to be debated “not only at the top” but to “get the people involved,” she put down her pen and applauded vigorously.

Agnes Adonyi, a secondary school teacher, found other things to applaud at the two days of meetings last weekend, since these were the people, in her view, who are trying to bring the Communist Party into a new age in Hungary, and perhaps in Europe. This is important to her, she said.

“I still believe I am a Communist,” she said. “It is perhaps hard to understand, but I was born into this society. For me, communism means always criticizing, always trying to improve.” But these are crucial times, she said. “This party has a lot to do if it is going to hold on.”

The meeting Adonyi attentively followed was organized by the “Reform Circles” of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, most of whose members now bristle visibly if they are called Communists. In fact, what most of them say they want is a “socialist party in the Western European mold.” Some already call themselves “social democrats.”

Embattled on Two Fronts

The reformers, however, are embattled on two fronts, first by the “cautious” elements in the party--no one here any longer admits to being “conservative”--that has ruled Hungary for 40 years and, most important, by the approach of free parliamentary elections, possibly as early as next March.

The reformers have been clearly on the march since May, 1988, when Karoly Grosz, regarded as a centrist, wrested the party leadership from Janos Kadar, who died in June. Since then, however, Grosz’s powers have been diluted in a four-member Presidium shared with new party Chairman Rezsoe Nyers, Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth and Minister of State Imre Pozsgay. Nyers, Nemeth and Pozsgay are all leading reformers.

As an indication of the ascendancy of the party’s liberal reformers, Grosz has indicated that he will step down at a party congress next month rather than see the party divided over a leadership battle.

But the specter that is haunting party members of all persuasions is the approaching election--and the grim electoral experience of the Communists in Poland. In Poland, Communists were humiliated in head-to-head contests with the opposition Solidarity movement and, even more ominously, the party’s handpicked leading liberals were rejected by the voters even though they ran unopposed.

Pal Vastagh, the party first secretary from Szeged and an energetic Reform Circle activist, says the party realizes that it faces a decisive battle in Hungary and believes that continued reform is its only salvation.

Although the Reform Circles started as a “theoretical workshop,” he said, “it now has become a whole wing of the party. The goal is the radical renewal of the party. We have to regain the confidence of society.”

Vastagh’s words indicated the leap that Hungary’s reform Communists have had to make--from years of maintaining the orthodox illusion of enjoying the support of the “masses” to the open acknowledgment that they must “regain” public acceptance.

“We don’t have much time to do it,” Vastagh said.

As Vastagh and others acknowledge, the Communists’ biggest obstacle, as their colleagues in Poland have already discovered, is running against a 40-year record of steady economic decline. The reformers have struck another chord, which they hope may resonate positively with the voters: modesty.

“We have to take into consideration the voices of our critics,” said Nyers, the architect of economic reforms in Hungary as far back as 1968, in his speech to the assembly of liberals. “We have to dismantle the monopoly over culture, economics and politics. We cannot claim to know the truth forever.”

However, the Communists have already lost four by-elections this year by substantial margins, and State Minister Pozsgay, the ambitious organizer of the Reform Circles, is trying to push the party faster and farther along the liberal course.

In a party Central Committee meeting held a day before the reformers met, he tried to push through a provision that would remove party organizations from workplaces, a long-cherished Communist Party privilege. The move failed, in what party participants said was a stormy session, and ended in a compromise that would allow opposition parties to organize workplace organizational offices as well.

Pozsgay spoke to the reformers too, only mildly acerbically when he noted that “some people” had recently discovered that the “Earth is not flat, but they have not yet found out that Australia is attached to it.”

The Hungarian Communists are hoping they may draw some advantage from divisions among opposition forces here. Unlike Poland, where Solidarity put up a unified drive against the Communists, Hungary has nine opposition organizations currently negotiating with the Communists over plans for the elections. Three or four of those groups are likely to claim large enough followings to split the opposition vote sufficiently to allow the Communists success in the first round of voting.

Tough negotiations are about to begin over the runoff election rounds. The Communists are proposing that anyone who wins a 15% share of the vote in the first round be eligible for the runoff.

It is hard to describe what lies ahead, even if the reformers are successful, first in their internal battles and afterward, if they survive the elections with a tenuous hold on shared power.

“The best thing is to call it ‘a change in the model,’ said party leader Nyers, “but even that cannot express the total reality.”