Laughter Trails Campaigning Communists as They Race Toward Their Last Hurrah : Hungary: A candidate’s officious show of speed and power attracts howls. Citizens think it’s funny that elements of the old guard act as if times hadn’t changed.

A four-car caravan, headlights blazing in the bright morning sunshine, barrels along the back country roads near Lake Balaton--a pair of sleek black Mercedes sedans with security cars fore and aft--scattering the chickens and the barnyard dogs in the swirling dust of its passage.

Some irony and perhaps a dash of pathos attends this whirlwind, unseen by the VIP passenger in the second of the sedans. It is laughter, from the kerchiefed old women sweeping their walkways with twig brooms, from a gang of children hanging out of schoolroom windows, all of them pointing down the road, big grins on their faces, howling with laughter.

It’s funny, it seems to them, to see the Communists racing to their last hurrah.

For, indeed, it could only be a high-rolling Communist politician who would sweep through the countryside with such a conspicuous display of speed and power. In this case, it was Imre Pozsgay, 54, in his final days as minister of state in the Hungarian government, and once one of the most powerful political figures in Hungary.

To be fair to Pozsgay (pronounced POHZ-GOY), he is no longer a Communist; he is one of the founding members of the Hungarian Socialist Party, the reconstituted Hungarian Socialist Workers Party. But, as Pozsgay himself says, “there is no gratitude in politics” and he is stuck, along with the rest of his fellow Socialists, with the Communist label, the most crippling liability possible for a politician fighting for a place in the elections to be held here Sunday.

There is little encouragement in the news these days for men such as Pozsgay, even though they are at pains to suggest that they do find encouraging that in the East German elections last Sunday, the socialist vote amounted to 16%. In Hungary, polls predict that in the first free elections since 1945, the Socialists--most Hungarians persist in calling them Communists whatever their official designation--will get no more than 10% of the vote.

Pozsgay is standing for election to Parliament from a constituency in Sopron, a city on Hungary’s Western border. He is up against a young firebrand from the national youth party called Fidesz. The Fidesz candidate, Jozsef Szajer, an assistant law professor at a Budapest university, is a native son of Sopron. Cockily referring to Pozsgay as a “political coward,” Szajer is convinced that he is headed for a big victory.

He may be right, but because of complex election laws, Pozsgay is virtually assured a seat in Parliament anyway, as a part of his party’s “national list.” Still, for a man with Pozsgay’s political ambition and still-considerable political muscle, the specter of defeat in a head-to-head race is unpleasant.

Pozsgay wants to be president of Hungary, an ambition that many political analysts here now believe is beyond his grasp. A year ago, before the full blossoming of Hungary’s new politics, his chances seemed much stronger.

Then, Pozsgay was still one of the most popular politicians in the country, and easily the best known, by virtue of his long campaign to get out in front of the reform wing of the Communist party.

It was Pozsgay who led the drive to force the party to reconsider the darker days of communism in Hungary, the 1956 revolution, a bloody national trauma that ended in a Soviet invasion. He was the first Communist politician to urge the historical rethinking, always an ordeal for Communists, and to flatly declare that, contrary to official dogma, the events of 1956 amounted to a “popular uprising,” and not a “counterrevolution,” as it had been in the orthodox view.

It was Pozsgay, as well, who threw his early support behind the Hungarian Democratic Forum, now one of the parties opposing the Socialists in the current election campaign. Pozsgay formed his own reform group inside the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party and, largely because of his leadership, the reformers essentially took over and renamed the party last October.

In all the sweeping changes that took place in Eastern Europe last year, Hungary was quiet, and made its own vital contribution to the upheavals in the East Bloc by throwing open its western borders to fleeing East Germans. Hungary was quiet in large part because the reforms being won in neighboring countries were already in motion here. And they were in motion not because of pressure from opposition groups, but because of reformers, Imre Pozsgay prominent among them, in the ruling Communist party.

Pudgy, sallow-faced, gray-haired, Pozsgay looks like a middle-aged Charles Laughton, impeccably dressed in gray suit and muted tie, and moves through a crowd with a slow, soft, catlike grace. This week, traveling through small towns in rural Hungary, he looked like an urban grandee, stepping out of the fancy car to be greeted by local party workers, with their work clothes and ill-fitting sports jackets.

Here, among the party faithful and unknown office-seekers, Pozsgay was applauded lustily. “It’s an honor just to sit next to such an important personality,” said one young candidate receiving Pozsgay’s endorsement.

But the rooms were small and so were the crowds, and the four cars full of aides and security men seemed to go with a campaign geared for higher power and a bigger scale, like an American gubernatorial campaign, say, dropped down in a bucolic village of Central Europe, overwhelmed by dogwood blossoms and the paralyzing splendor of a soft spring day.

Like any politician, Pozsgay has his version of The Speech, delivered again and again in a succession of rooms like the one in Zalaszentgrot, where a banner hanging behind the speakers’ table proclaims the party’s motto for the campaign, “Nation, Progress, Security.”

Security, in the sense of stability, is the main thrust for the Socialists, an argument that suggests that the Socialists, with their links to present and past power structures, can somehow ensure change that is manageable, progress that will not be too great a wrench from the past.

“I have been asked why the Hungarian Socialist Party is not shouting as loud as the others,” Pozsgay began in Zalaszentgrot. “Well, we do not have a reason to hide ourselves and feel guilty, but we have no obligation to take part in a campaign of loud shouting and threats. . . . We don’t want to get into that style of hostility.”

He admits, in his talks, that the party--he means the old party--made “mistakes” and “found itself on a dead-end street.” But he argues that “without the Socialists, (change) would have happened here the way it happened in Bu charest.

“Even if this party contributed nothing more than this, it is a significant contribution.”

But even in an audience full of friendly faces, there are some who reflect what is probably the larger view outside the party, which is, indeed, that the party is due more scorn than gratitude.

One man spoke up in the question period and told Pozsgay that the “whole system” of the past was wrong, that he had worked “like an animal” all his life and now had nothing to show for it but a pensioner’s income inadequate to keep up with steadily rising prices. “Now my wife is sick and I am too old to work any more. What do you have to say to this?”

“There are lots of people like you and me,” Pozsgay said with the politician’s fluid knack of placing himself in the company of the impoverished, “who have worked all their lives for democracy. . . .”

Pozsgay admits that the campaign is difficult, the crowds sometimes small and the sensation frequent that the tide is running against him.

“Obviously,” he said, “it is not a good feeling.”

But, declaring himself a one-man crusade against Hungary’s natural pessimism, he believes he will win the election in Sopron.

“As for defeat,” he said, “you have to have that possibility in a democracy.”

In any case, he still plans, he said, to run for president when that election is held, probably in September.

“In half a year,” he said, “it is possible that the people will see our contribution.” In six months of the new politics, he hopes, perhaps Imre Pozsgay will again look like a good bet for the Hungarian presidency.

As though in practice for that once and future campaign, an aide came to extract him from the meeting and usher him out to the car, idling at the curb, its door held open. Pozsgay shook a few more hands, the door slammed shut, and the caravan roared off in a cloud of dust.