New Politics for Hungary

Hungary’s Communist Party has declared political bankruptcy, reorganized under a new name and with different top managers, and is now back in business offering what it says is a better line of goods. This remarkable transformation, unprecedented in the history of world communism, represents a last-ditch effort to give the party that has held near-totalitarian power for 40 years a gloss of respectability as Hungary prepares for promised multiparty elections next spring. The more committed among the party’s reformers, however, are already questioning whether the metamorphosis goes far enough.

Much of Hungarian communism’s old guard has found a home within the successor Socialist Party and managed to retain some measure of ideological influence as well. Thus the new platform states that “the party is a left-wing socialist party striving for a synthesis between fundamental socialist and communist values.” Most Hungarians are likely to regard this hybrid as representing something less than a clean break with the discredited and despised past. For those who last week called themselves communists but who now say they have turned Lenin’s picture to the wall, it represents an uneasy compromise, dictated by a sense that if the party is to have any hope for future electoral success it must avoid further internal squabbles.

The reformers nonetheless can claim to have achieved much of what they wanted. While the platform pledges to prevent the restoration of capitalism “by all political means,” it also promises--without attempting to explain the paradox--to “abandon our stubborn prejudice against private property.” It calls for abolishing the state’s monopoly in education, for transforming the party-controlled Worker’s Militia into a non-military emergency-aid organization, and for opening parliamentary discussions on how to dispose of the considerable real estates and other assets that were acquired by the Communist Party during the course of its rule.

Like Poland’s Solidarity-led government, the Socialist Party has carefully committed itself to maintaining good relations with the Soviet Union and membership in the Warsaw Pact and Comecon trade bloc. As for the 50,000 Soviet troops still stationed in Hungary, the party says their withdrawal must await a general agreement on disarmament in Europe.

All this, as the reformers worry, is likely to be interpreted by most Hungarians as something less than a full separation from the party’s past. The central and historically impressive fact nonetheless remains that the Hungarian Communist Party has dissolved itself, and its successor has solemnly pledged to abide by the free political choice of the electorate. That vote, if polls are right, is likely to leave those who have long ruled Hungary and who are responsible for its economic and social malaise no more than a small opposition party.

That moment has not yet arrived. But the point of no return does seem to have been reached, with Hungary headed for an electoral revolution that--more than four decades after a Communist coup d’etat--will provide it with a true popular-based government. Step by step, country by country, the system that Stalin imposed on Eastern Europe is being dismantled and interred.