Hungary Nostalgic for ‘Goulash’ Days : Elections: A painful path to capitalism has voters upset. An ex-Communist who put the first tear in the Iron Curtain looks set to profit.

The shambling, stooped figure and squinty countenance of Gyula Horn rekindle memories of a time that many here now look back on as this nation’s heyday. The last days of Communist rule, when Horn served as foreign minister, unfolded in an atmosphere of inspiration and daring as Hungarians paved the way to freedom for an enslaved empire.

It was Horn who refused to deport East German refugees to the dictatorial regime they had escaped. Inflicting the first decisive tear in the Iron Curtain, he cut through a security fence on the border with Austria five years ago to symbolically break down the barrier between East and West.

A little-noticed party functionary until the late 1980s, Horn took the whispered words of reformist Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to heart, spearheading an internal political revolution that led to the first free elections in East Europe.

Now, four years after that first vote swept Horn and his reform-minded Communist brethren from power, his regenerated Hungarian Socialist Party is poised for a comeback in Sunday’s second post-Cold War election. Despite campaign muckraking by the governing parties that sought to cast him as a secret police thug and an election-eve car accident that sent him to the hospital with an injured neck, Horn appears set to capitalize on Hungarian nostalgia for the gentle days of “goulash communism.”

The latest opinion polls show the largest share of decided voters favoring the Socialists, upward of 31% and rising as fence-sitters make their choices.

That is nearly twice the support voiced for the next-most-popular party, the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats. Many expect the alliance to join forces with Horn’s party to form a left-leaning government after what is likely to be a widely fractured vote.

The growing appeal of the Socialists has made them the political force to be contended with and moved parties once staunchly opposed to any alliance with former Communists to accept the front-runners as potential partners.

Horn, 61, has left his options open by declining to declare himself a candidate for prime minister. He may be holding back that political plum as a coalition inducement to the Free Democrats, who have ardently pushed Gabor Kuncze, 44, a technocrat, for the top government job.

“Nothing has been decided yet, and we are quite gripped by anxiety at the prospect of such a coalition,” conceded Ivan Peto, president of the Free Democrats and a former dissident during the Communist era. “But there may be no other alternative.”

Peto brushed off the possibility of an alliance with the incumbent Hungarian Democratic Forum, a center-right party that is trailing in fourth place because voters blame it for the economic hardships that have mounted over its four-year rule.

Blue-collar laborers, struggling pensioners and the 13% of Hungarian workers idled by the painful transition to capitalism are following the trend set last year in Poland by reconsidering the Socialists, who at least provided them subsistence wages and steady work.

“These are honest, hard-working people--not like the crooks in government who have brought us only new troubles,” Zsuzsa Apali, 26, a bookkeeper, said at a Friday night Socialist rally. Like many young workers, she is forced to live at home with her unemployed parents because she cannot afford her own housing, and they need her income to survive.

The Forum, led by the late Prime Minister Jozsef Antall until his death in December, and two smaller coalition partners chalked up the honor of being the only East European government to serve out its first full mandate. But it failed to fulfill promises to transfer industry from state to private ownership, while inflation has ranged from 20% to 40% each year, and the jobless rate climbed steadily upward.

The ruling coalition has also been criticized by Western human rights agencies for exerting undue influence over state-controlled radio and television.

Most of the electronic media wrath has been directed against the Socialists. But the campaign appears to have backfired since the April 29 airing of a highly provocative claim that Horn worked as a secret police operative and beat anti-Communist demonstrators after the failed 1956 revolt.

“His popularity has only increased,” Peto said of Horn. “People have learned not to trust anything they see or hear on TV.”

Horn missed his last pre-election rally before today’s mandatory day of campaign silence after suffering a broken wrist and fractured vertebrae in a car accident late Thursday while returning from campaigning in the eastern city of Miskolc.

Few at the closing rally outside party headquarters here showed much concern that the injury, likely to keep Horn in the hospital for a week, would set back the Socialists’ chances.

“People know who they want to vote for. If anything, the Socialists will do better because there will be a show of sympathy” because of the accident, said Jozsef Nagy, a 38-year-old roofer who supported the Forum four years ago but plans this time to back Horn’s party.

Despite the Socialists’ commanding lead in the polls, little is likely to be decided in Sunday’s first ballot for the 386-seat Parliament. Many of the races for individual seats are likely to require a second-round vote on May 29.