COLUMN ONE : Struck by a National Bad Mood : Extraordinary political reforms in Hungary are evoking fear and uncertainty, not euphoria. ‘All the rules are changed,’ one psychiatrist observes.

The face of Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth, as he stands before the lame-duck Hungarian National Assembly daring it to press a vote of no-confidence, is a study in gloom. He wins his argument and averts the vote, but weariness and the pessimism registered on his features remains.

The taxi driver, his offers to change money at black-market rates declined, sinks back into sullen combat with the traffic, turning up the disco music on the radio one more notch. “What the hell,” he says. “It makes no difference.”

The Hungarian-born American manager of the successful lighting manufacturer Tungsram, Gyorgy Varga, makes steady rounds among 18,000 employees, conspicuously informal in his shirt sleeves and trying to spread Yankee optimism.

“The whole country is not in a good mood,” Varga says. “We’re going to have to make a mind change here.”

The mood of depression is widespread in Hungary--and all the more striking for the fact that the country is on the verge of free elections, the culmination of a long process of reform that will finally, and probably irrevocably, remove the Communist Party from power after 42 years.

Given the approach of these long-awaited changes, it would seem more probable that this nation of 11 million would be closer to euphoria than gloom. But the sense of foreboding, of deep pessimism, is pervasive and obvious, to natives and newcomers alike.

The mood of Hungary is also an illustration of the danger, uncertainty and fear associated with the transformation of an entire economic, political and social system, and a reminder that such changes are not all flag-waving joy for new-found liberties. For most people, the change is a nerve-racking process--and, as Hungarians swiftly point out, you don’t have to be an ousted Communist to feel nervous and embittered.

All serious change, psychologists note, is fraught with uncertainty and fear. And the change of a political system is no less fraught than, for example, the end of a marriage (even a bad one) or a change in jobs (even to a better one).

“All the rules are changed,” Dr. Andras Veer, director of Budapest’s largest psychiatric hospital, said in a recent interview. “The situation of former leaders is up for grabs. But it’s not just political. All leadership jobs are up for grabs.”

And below the leadership level, in offices and factories, in pensioners’ apartments where the rent is going up and even newspapers are too expensive to buy, the less powerful wait in suspense for the effect on their own lives.

Some pessimism here comes from economic uncertainty:

New taxes now take a 30% slice of the average Hungarian’s income (10,000 forints a month, or about $150).

The consumer price index jumped 17% in 1989, 15% the year before that.

One-fifth of the population lives on an income of less than 4,300 forints a month (about $65), the officially designated “social minimum.”

About 70% of Hungarian men hold more than one job and work up to 14 1/2 hours a day, and heart attacks are on the rise.

For Hungarians, Poles and East Germans--and soon, probably, for Czechoslovaks as well--real incomes are not keeping up, despite the effort.

Jobs, at whatever income, are no longer secure for many people. In Poland, unemployment has been growing at the rate of 100,000 per month; the same specter looms over Hungary.

At Tungsram, Varga’s first order of business will be to trim the payroll; a hiring freeze, early retirement plans and attrition, Varga calculates, will cut his work force by 2,000 in the next two years. He declines to say much beyond that, except to note that there will have to be cuts in white-collar personnel.

“Too many people handling too many pieces of paper,” he said.

Judit Gergely, the managing director of Investcenter, an office set up to help promote foreign investment and joint ventures with Hungarian concerns, sometimes finds herself subject to the pessimism, even though her official duties call for the opposite approach.

After a year of trying, and the intercession of the deputy minister of telecommunications, she is still unable to get a home telephone, even though it is essential to her work, and her work is deemed important to the national interest.

“Whether I’m depressed or not depends on what time of day you ask me,” she said, adding: “People are depressed because they are not used to inflation. They are not used to dynamism. They don’t see opportunity, they see danger.”

Few Hungarians, evidently, see any answer in the blossoming of the new politics. A recent survey showed that only 45% of the population believes that Hungary is ready for democracy. In part, some believe, the pessimism grows out of the campaigns of the three or four most important new parties, which focus more on blaming the Communists for the nation’s problems than on suggesting better times might lie ahead.

To psychiatrist Veer, the new political parties have added to Hungary’s psychological burdens, perhaps even unconsciously. He cites two posters, displayed all across the country, by two of the leading competitors in the March 25 elections, the Hungarian Democratic Forum and the Alliance of Free Democrats.

The Democratic Forum posters show the back of a fat neck and head, squeezed between a green military hat and collar. “Comrades, goodby,” says the legend.

“I have asked many people what they think the meaning of this poster is,” Veer said, “and almost everyone tells me they think it means a shot to the head.”

The most accessible interpretation of the poster, he added, is that the unattractive figure represents the Soviet military, but “the identity of the ‘comrade’ is not really defined. Everyday people don’t take the time to think over problems like that. They cannot figure it out. It adds up to frustration.”

The other poster, from the Free Democrats, carries the warning, “Those who are not with us are with THEM.” The last word is underlined in red.

“This suggests that those who are not with the Free Democrats are Communists,” Veer explained. “It says, ‘If I don’t think the way they do, I am a Communist, and people will hate me.’ ”

The problem, as Veer sees it, is that “meaning is not articulated, so frustration is the result. We know we are frustrated, but we don’t know why. . . . We wake up with this fear and go to bed with this fear every day. I think it is very dangerous to prepare for democracy in this way.”

The dark undertone of the Hungarian political campaign is notable in contrast to Poland and Czechoslovakia, the two most comparable East Bloc countries. In the closing weekend of last year’s Solidarity election campaign in Poland, for example, a poster appeared showing Gary Cooper, in a still from the movie “High Noon,” striding forward on his way to a showdown--in this case, at the ballot box.

Significantly, Cooper’s six-gun was painted out of the picture. And the poster, which became an overnight collectors’ item, was seen as clever and funny, not threatening.

In Czechoslovakia, the revolution that ousted the Communists last November also was renowned for its gentle temper and its humor. One student banner, carried in the massive demonstrations that led to the change, brought a characteristic laugh with its demand: “We want a government with a higher IQ.”

A major difference between those two countries and Hungary is that the Polish and Czechoslovak populaces had a clear center of opposition to rally around--Solidarity in Warsaw, Civic Forum and Charter 77 in Prague.

The changes in Hungary, meanwhile, were gradual and actually were led by figures inside the Communist Party. The new opposition parties, formed in the last year, are unknown quantities to most Hungarians, who know they no longer want Communists ruling them, but are uncertain how to settle on a successor through the continuing dislocations of an economic revolution.

Now, as the evidence in Hungary and Poland suggests, Eastern Europeans are in for visions that are commonplace enough in the West, but are still wrenching here: The old man rummaging through trash barrels for castaway items good enough to use or sell, the old woman picking through a box of bones at a meat market in search of one with enough gristle attached to make a thin soup.

Janos Hernadi works as a restaurant manager in a first-class Budapest hotel, a job that provides him with a good income, a comfortable house, two cars--and a familiar, Western-style, middle-class lament that he can never manage to save any money. He is fortunate, he knows, but like many Hungarians, he is caught short by the new realities.

“I went to visit my father last weekend,” Hernadi recalled recently. “He’s retired, getting up in years. We were watching television, and I started looking around for the newspaper to check the TV schedule.

“I asked him where the paper was, and he said, ‘Well, I don’t buy the newspaper every day anymore.’ Now, in all my life, I cannot remember my father not buying the newspaper every day. I was mortified, embarrassed for not realizing. He doesn’t buy it because he can no longer afford it. This is a small thing, but we see it around us all the time now, and it frightens us.”

To Veer, part of the pessimism is, in a sense, uniquely Hungarian, an inheritance of history.

“For 1,000 years,” he said, “Hungarians have been struggling to gain an identity for the nation.” And most Hungarians, he observed, believe that struggle is still going on.

Meanwhile, for more than 100 years--as long as anyone has been keeping statistics--Hungarians have led all the world’s nations in the rate of suicide. The phenomenon is well-known, deeply ingrained and has had nothing to do with Communist rule; indeed, the trend was there long before the Communists took over in 1948, although they did nothing to diminish it. For years, the number of suicides has run about 5,000 annually in a population of 11 million.

However, in each of the last two years the number has declined sharply, to about 4,100. It is the kind of drop in the suicide rate that typically occurs only in times of war, when the struggle to survive overpowers even overwhelming despair.

It is, as Veer suggests, a curiously double-edged statistic, a positive trend that shows what a struggle life in Hungary has become.