Hungary’s Jewish community breathed a collective sigh of relief at the decisive defeat of the country’s ruling right-wing coalition in last week’s elections.
Voting with their pocketbooks, the Hungarian electorate gave a stunning victory to the Socialists in the May 29 elections, which followed a first round of voting on May 8.
The Socialist Party, which was created by the reform wing of the former Communist Party, won 209 seats in the single-chamber, 386-seat Parliament.
On Saturday, Gyula Horn, the leader of the Socialists, was chosen by his party to be the new prime minister. Horn, who is expected to win easy confirmation by Parliament, was foreign minister when the Communists lost power four years ago to the right-of-center Hungarian Democratic Forum.
While the Socialists have enough seats in Parliament to govern alone, Horn said Saturday that he will seek a coalition partner to broaden support for the difficult economic reforms that lie ahead.
Hungarians, who in recent years have faced high inflation and double-digit unemployment, favored the Socialist platform of reforms as their best hope for a brighter economic future.
Horn’s most likely coalition partner will be the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats, which is often nicknamed here “the Jewish party,” because of its numerous Jewish supporters.
The Alliance placed second in the elections, winning 70 Parliament seats.
“Of course, this is satisfying for Hungary’s Jews, who are happy about the outcome of the second free elections” in post-Communist Hungary, Gusztav Zoltai, the managing director of the Association of Hungarian Jewish Communities, said in a telephone interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
CSURKA FAILED TO GET RE-ELECTED
Zoltai noted that the Hungarian Jewish community, which numbers approximately 100,000, was pleased that Istvan Csurka, a former member of the conservative Democratic Forum, had failed to get re-elected to Parliament.
Csurka has publicly made a number of anti-Semitic speeches in the past, including one on the floor of the Hungarian Parliament.
He often stated that Jews were running the country and that they, along with world Jewry as a whole, were seeking to dominate Hungary.
Csurka got only 1 percent of the votes in the first round of voting.
Although emphasizing his intention to stay out of everyday politics, Zoltai expressed the hope that the new government would act against anti-Semitism with greater effort than the previous right-of-center government had.
Zoltai also said it is necessary to pass legislation in Hungary making it a crime to deny that the Holocaust ever took place.
Zoltai criticized the previous government for not doing enough to return Jewish property that had been confiscated during World War II.
The election results show that the majority of Hungarians, far from hankering for a return to Communist rule, disliked the centuries-old nationalistic ideas of the ruling rightist coalition and blamed them for the country’s economic troubles.
The voting was mostly decided by the middle class, many of whom became unemployed during an economic downturn they blamed on four years of rule by the Democratic Forum.
Former Communists recently returned to power in Poland, Lithuania and Slovakia. They were never removed from power in Romania, and they are still important in Bulgaria.
Hungary’s Socialists, former Reform-Communists, were able to make a peaceful transition to their new party structure in the post-Communist era.
The election gave a comfortable majority to the country’s social and liberal forces, said Zoltai, who added that there is no danger of a strong rightist opposition in Parliament.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
