The Man Who Stands Ready to Be Hungary’s King

Gyorgy von Hapsburg knows that the chances he will ever be king of Hungary are exceedingly small. Yet it is hard to shake the impression that he lives with an eye to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, that could happen.

Discussing the odds for the restoration of the monarchy in a land his grandfather once ruled, Archduke Gyorgy, to use his royal title, verbally dances around the question like the diplomat he is.

“Who knows?” he says, noting that history shows it’s wrong to say “never.”

If called upon to serve as king or prime minister, “I wouldn’t say no,” he adds. “My family still has historical responsibility. But there are so many ‘if if if if ifs.’ ”

Gyorgy, 37, moved to Budapest from Germany nine years ago, learned to give speeches and interviews in Hungarian, married a German duchess with her own family ties to European royalty and recently built a home complete with stables just outside this centuries-old capital. He wears three hats: local television executive; Hungarian ambassador to the European Parliament; and representative in Hungary for his father, Otto von Hapsburg, 89, who would be emperor of Austria and king of Hungary if those jobs still existed.

King Ferdinand I, whose reign began in 1526, was the first Hapsburg to rule Hungary. The last monarch in the dynasty was Otto’s father, Emperor Charles I of Austria, who was also King Charles IV of Hungary.

Born and raised in southern Germany, Gyorgy first visited Hungary for the 1989 funeral of his grandmother Zita, the last empress and queen. In the next few years, he traveled here frequently with his father, who is fluent in Hungarian, a notoriously difficult language.

“Everyone expects automatically that I also speak Hungarian,” Gyorgy says. “And I didn’t. I felt very bad about it. Then I tried to learn it in Germany. It didn’t work. So in the beginning of 1993, I came here to learn Hungarian. Then it was practically like an avalanche of things happening to me. I will stay here, and I most probably am going to die here.”

Gyorgy’s older brother, Karl, would be first in line after Otto for the thrones of the Austro-Hungarian “dual monarchy,” which collapsed in 1918. But Gyorgy, next in line, is the only one of seven siblings who has forged a strong Hungarian connection. With a gesture toward his wife, Archduchess Eilika, 29, seated beside him, he says: “Besides, of course, getting married, the best decision I took in my life was to come to Hungary.”

Beginning in her late teens, the former Eilika von Oldenburg sometimes attended the same balls or other European social events he did, Gyorgy says. At some, they spoke. There were others where they only later learned they had both been guests. Then, in 1995, they met again “at a weekend that was organized by an aunt of mine in the Alps,” he recalls.

“We had long and very serious discussions,” he says, as Eilika starts laughing. “It was a very harsh discussion between Lutheran and Catholic basic ideas. The whole weekend we were arguing a lot, making a lot of walks, and we were always discussing things.”

But somehow, instead of pushing them apart, those debates brought them together. Eilika came to Budapest with a group of friends. He saw her in Paris. Soon they were trading visits, and their telephone bills went up, he says.

The couple married in a high-profile 1997 ceremony in Budapest, with a guest list that had nobility rubbing shoulders with former senior Communists.

Asked for a capsule summary of Hapsburg history, Gyorgy says the family “started its career” in 10th century Switzerland.

“We had in our family the [Holy Roman] Emperor Charles [V],” he says. “It was said that in his kingdom, the sun never set, because he was also king of Spain, and Spain was in South America. . . . But let’s say--sorry for my bad English--our ‘core business’ was Central Europe.”

Last year, Archduchess Sophia, the couple’s first child, became the first Hapsburg to be born in Hungary in more than 50 years.

Sophia is being raised as a Roman Catholic, in the traditional faith of the Hapsburgs. But Eilika says she feels no need to convert.

Rather than have a wife who claims to be Catholic but “doesn’t feel it,” Gyorgy says, “I prefer much more having someone who is a convinced Lutheran and feels very well in this Lutheran religion.”

Eilika’s work focuses on horseback riding as physical therapy for disabled children. She runs programs at their home and is on the board of the Hungarian Riding for the Disabled Federation.

While growing up in Bavaria, Gyorgy spoke German at home, learned English and French at school, picked up Spanish during frequent vacations at a family home in Spain and added Italian on visits to cousins in Italy, he says. In his university years, he studied law in Innsbruck, Austria, then history and political science in Munich, Germany, and finally Islamic studies for a year in Madrid. During school vacations, he worked in television.

After moving to Budapest, he started working for MTM-SBS Television, Hungary’s first nationwide private TV network. He is now international relations director for the firm’s TV2 and holds both Hungarian and Austrian citizenship.

In 1996, Socialist Prime Minister Gyula Horn named Gyorgy ambassador at large for European integration. The appointment marked the first time that a Hapsburg had held public office in Hungary since 1918. When a center-right government came to power two years later, Prime Minister Viktor Orban renewed the appointment.

Most of his job involves serving as the country’s liaison to the European Parliament, Gyorgy says. Hungary is not yet a member of the parliament, but it hopes to join the European Union in 2004. Family ties are a major asset for his diplomatic duties, he says.

Still, whatever Gyorgy’s strengths as a diplomat, Hungarians are in no mood to bring back even a constitutional monarchy, says Tamas Fricz, director of the Budapest-based 21st Century Institute for Political Science. Longtime Communist dictator Janos Kadar was “the last ‘king’ in Hungary” and now people are “fed up with the notion of one leader above them,” Fricz said.

So Gyorgy is not a candidate for king but rather “a decoration,” Fricz said. “He helps Hungary, and he represents Hungarian interests--but nothing more.”