Hungary Elects Veteran of ’56 Uprising as President

The Parliament of Hungary launched a new era of democracy Wednesday by electing as head of state a veteran of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, now hailed as a noble fight for freedom.

The choice of 68-year-old Arpad Goncz (pronounced AH-pahd Gernts) to be president was engineered by the two biggest parties in Parliament in an attempt to render unnecessary a direct presidential election loosely scheduled for late summer and to avoid another divisive fight for power.

The behind-the-scenes deal arranged by the leading party, the Hungarian Democratic Forum, and its main opposition, the Free Democrats, appears to be a trade-off of the mostly ceremonial presidential post by the former for the latter’s cooperation on political and economic reform laws. Goncz is a member of the Free Democrats.

The Parliament had been expected to elect a Forum member to serve as president until a vote for the office that had been expected in September.

While the selection of Goncz and the new alliance of convenience between the rival parties came as a surprise, the political deal-making is unlikely to ruffle Hungarian voters, who are eager to break with the single-party monopoly of the past.

Parliament’s emotional opening session fell on the anniversary of Hungary’s decision last year to cut down its stretch of the Iron Curtain by removing barbed-wire fences, an action that opened an escape route to the West and triggered the collapse of one Communist government after another in Eastern Europe.

It was a day of reckoning for the nation. The Parliament’s first act was to declare the failed 1956 revolution a “war of independence.” The day of its outbreak, Oct. 23, was designated as an annual national holiday.

“What failed in 1956 is now achieved,” the deputies declared in a resolution passed without a dissenting vote.

Unlike in other states in Eastern Europe, where the break with communism was more dramatic and sometimes violent, Hungary embarked on its peaceful transition under the guidance of reform Communists. But the Socialists who succeeded the disbanded Communist Party won less than 10% of the vote in elections held in March and April, the first free vote in more than four decades.

“We are proud to have been part of the making of this moment,” interim Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth, a Socialist, told the opening session. “It was not our aim to preserve our own power.”

Nemeth had been widely favored to win the presidential election. The two biggest parties were likely worried by a recent opinion poll showing him well ahead of all other rumored contenders.

The 33 surviving Socialists in Parliament, which has 386 seats, stand to see their influence further curtailed by the informal arrangement between the Forum and the Free Democrats.

Forum leader Joszef Antall, who is expected to be designated the new prime minister today, joined Peter Tolgyessy of the Free Democrats at a press conference before the parliamentary vote on the presidency to announce that both parties were proposing Goncz for the post.

Goncz, a lawyer and writer, was sentenced to life imprisonment after the 1956 revolt was crushed by a Soviet invasion. He was freed in the general amnesty of 1963.

He is president of the Hungarian Writers Assn., and his selection follows the example set in neighboring Czechoslovakia, where the head of state, Vaclav Havel, is also a prominent writer who suffered under the Communists.

Both Antall and Tolgyessy praised Goncz as a respected figure who would put the nation’s interests above party politics. They also proposed that Parliament amend the constitution to allow the head of state to be appointed, arguing that Hungary has neither the financial nor emotional resources to carry out another lengthy campaign this year.

Candidates from the Forum and the Free Democrats had accused each other of negative campaigning and dirty tricks during the protracted run for Parliament that ended with six major parties winning seats, but none with an outright majority.

The Forum has been negotiating with two conservative parties, the Independent Smallholders and the Christian Democrats, to form a new government, with the Free Democrats expected to provide the main opposition force in Parliament.

Some Hungarian media, such as the daily newspaper Nepszabadsag, reported that the Forum and Free Democrats are reconsidering a “grand coalition” to pool the strength of the two largest parties in the effort to build democracy and move toward a free-market economy. But Antall dismissed those reports as “totally baseless,” reiterating that the Free Democrats will not be partners in the government he expects to announce in about two weeks.

Goncz replaces interim President Matyas Szuros as both state president and as Speaker of the Parliament.

Forum member Gyorgy Szabad was voted Goncz’s chief deputy and is expected to become Speaker if a constitutional change can be made to allow Parliament rather than the electorate to elect the president. Szuros, a Socialist, was also named a deputy Speaker.

The session’s opening evoked deep emotion, with Hungarian journalists and parliamentary staff joining the deputies in singing the national anthem and listening with rapt attention to a recitation of 1848 revolutionary Sandor Petofi’s ode “To the Parliament” that appeals for a new and better nation.

Deputies welcomed two prominent guests with ovations: Otto von Hapsburg, the former crown prince of Hungary, and Bela Varga, parliamentary leader before the 1948 Communist takeover.

Varga, who lives in New York, told his successors: “I thank providence that I was able to live long enough to see the fate of my country turning for the better.”