Toward Democracy, Minus Much Euphoria : Hungary: Non-communists, anti-communists and former party members struggle for political position in the post-communist era.

It is fashionable to lament the state of American democracy and its leaders and to extoll the exuberance and intellectual ferment occuring in Eastern Europe. Most of the accolades are directed at Czechoslovakia and its new playwright-president, Vaclav Havel. A friend of mine, an admitted Havel groupie, recently told me that Havel’s first play is an eerily prescient view of the continuing collapse of communism. Havel even included one of the play’s lines in his inaugural address.

But heady optimism and lyrical political discourse are hardly uniform throughout Eastern Europe.

I met Gyula Kodolanyi--Hungary’s answer to Havel--at his home in the Buda hills above Budapest on the final day of the 1980s. A playwright and essayist (novels bore him “because they are not as dense as poetry or a good essay”), he displayed a relaxed and friendly manner. He was less the political leader he has become than the professor of comparative literature he always was.

“Hungary had no 1981,” Kodolanyi said, regretfully. He was referring to the Gdansk shipyard uprising that thrust Solidarity upon the scene. He might as well have said that his country “had no 1989,” either. Hungary experienced no dramatic, cathartic turn toward freedom as did the other East European nations. Its move toward liberalization began two years earlier. Democratization is slow, almost imperceptible, and to some extent disillusioning for Hungarians.

Hungary is undergoing a political shakeout as non-communists, anti-communists and former communists struggle to position themselves for the post-communist era. One reason for the apparent confusion and disorder is that there was no galvanizing, central force--a la Poland’s Solidarity--that opened the door to freedom and can serve as the obvious replacement for the Communists.

Given the country’s relatively mature democracy, the issues, by definition, are not inspired by “first principles.” Rather, they are the mundane questions of second-best solutions. In short, Hungarian politics, and the person-on-the-street’s reaction to it, is more akin to American politics than to what is going on in Czechoslovakia. More than one Hungarian complained to me that the nation’s politicians seemed to spend more time arguing about personalities, party alignments and politics than debating how to improve the country’s lot. There were frequent envious references to Czechoslovakia.

But there is meaningful debate among Hungarian politicians as they struggle to find the right democratic capitalist formula for their country. Kodolanyi, co-leader of Hungary’s chapter of the Helsinki Watch, a group that monitors human-rights accords, also was a founder, in the early ‘80s, of the Hungarian Democratic Forum, an organization of intellectual dissidents. It has now emerged as the leading opposition party in Hungary and will probably capture more than 40% of the votes in the country’s first free parliamentary elections next month. The Democratic Forum is brazenly free-market. Even Austria’s or Scandinavia’s mild socialism is rejected.

Ferenzo Koszeg, Kodolanyi’s co-chair of the Helsinki Watch group, is a leader of the Free Democrats, a party to the left, if you will, of the Forum. He lives in a comfortable apartment above Budapest’s most fashionable shopping street, the Vaci. Koszeg is soft-spoken but intense. The vice in the Democratic Forum’s platform, says Koszeg and his fellow Free Democrats, is indifference to the need for a social safety net.

Szilard Nyakas, a radio commentator and member of the Independent Social Democratic Party, echoes Koszeg’s views. But the Social Democrats, which come in two other flavors besides the Independents, envision a more active and pervasive state role in economic management. They also worry about the class divisions that will “inevitably” result from the switch to a free economy. During our conversation, Nyakas frequently peppered his speech with Marxisms.

But, in virtually identical language, all three men--Kodolanyi, Koszeg, and Nyakas--said that the Communists now have “no credit,” meaning no credibility with or support from the populace. (The leading opposition paper is called Credit.) Only through “demagoguery” can the Communists return to power. But all three, to varying degrees, see this as a possibility, since the country’s economic position is weak.

Hungary has the highest per capita debt of any nation in Europe. Most Hungarians expect the economy to deteriorate markedly in the next year or so. Even the most optimistic speak of serious unemployment. The opposition figures with whom I spoke worry that the country’s brewing economic crisis will turn the people against their new free government, allowing the Communists to ride back to power as latter-day Huey Longs.

There is widespread bafflement about why President Bush has not rushed to bolster the country’s turn toward democracy. Still, despite our romanticized visions of “captive nations” yearning to breathe free, as Bush put it during his visit to Hungary, it is hard to find a Hungarian who picks a U.S. for what their country should become. There is a great desire to avoid what in Hungary is viewed as American materialism, superficiality and extreme class divisions.

Strolling along the Vaci on New Year’s Eve, my Magyar companion suddenly gushed, apparently for my benefit, that “America is coming.” She was pointing at an Estee Lauder boutique up ahead.

By contrast, when I asked Koszeg the following day what Americans could best do to help promote democracy in Hungary, he cited the example of the American Civil Liberties Union. When the Communists recently unveiled their list of “crimes against the state” (read: dissent), the Hungarian opposition relied on an ACLU analysis of First Amendment objections to the Smith Act, a law designed to combat dissent in the United States, to fight the proposals. So armed, the democratic opposition beat back the Communists, securing significant advances for democracy and freedom of speech in Hungary. I didn’t have the heart to tell Koszeg that George Bush was, in large measure, elected President by attacking the ACLU as un-American.