György G. MÁRKUS PARTY POLITICS, PARTY SYSTEM AND THE TYPOLOGY OF POLITICAL CLEAVAGES IN HUNGARY Working Paper: Budapest 1998 - Barcelona 2000 CONTENTS: 11 Years of Multipartism in Hungary - Classical Cleavage Theory Revisited The Historical Dimension: Hungarian Cleavages and Parties Prior to 1989 Frozen Cleavages and Changing Parties in Post-Communist Hungary from 1989 to Mid-1997 The Restructuring of the Party System: NATO Referendum 1997 - Parliamentary Elections 1998 CHAPTER ONE 11 Years of Multipartism in Hungary – Classical Cleavage Theory Revisited The Cleavage Basis of the Party System and the Stability of Democracy In modern societies multipartism has proved to be the only viable and possible form of democracy. Thus, the question about the consolidation of the party system in post-communist Hungary involves the prospects of democracy itself. We accept the Rokkanian theis of political sociology based on the historical experiences of Western countries: the stability of party systems depends on the adequate cleavage structure of the competing parties. This is a precondition for the popular representativity of the parties, of the party system, this is the only way for them to present - in the form of political options - well-defined social (or even historical) alternatives on one hand, and to create strong and enduring identifications between segments of the society and themselves, to establish a partisan linkage between social structure and government, between citizens and public policies. The cleavage basis of the party system can be looked upon as a decisive factor of the legitimacy of governance. We mention two theoretical and practical dilemmas right at the beginning in connection with the investigation of parties and cleavages in the context of a Central European post-communist country like Hungary. One is the bias of overestimating the environmental deterministic constraints of political actors and institutions and underestimating their - measure of - autonomy. For if we do so and conceive of parties as prisoners of cleavages and commit the mistake of falling under a kind of economic or ''sociological superstition' (Sartori), we might come close to a TINA (There Is No Alternative) proposition contradicting the very principles of democracy (which we also want to tie to the condition of the existence of stable political cleavages). This dilemma is reflected in the on-going debate and interaction between two schools or currents of political science: that of political sociology more inclined to determinism, to the concept of the primacy of the social structure, the culture and the economy over politics, and that of political institutionalism more inclined to the primacy of politics over the sub-systems of society biased towards concentrating on “the actors' logic". (Lane-Ersson, Von Beyme) The second dilemma is less general, more regional. In post-communist countries we witness discontinuity, not only in the sphere of politics, but also in economy and social structure. For many, this fact eo ipso involves the sheer impossibility of party competition and party politics based on stable cleavage-based collective identities. Assuming an inherent weakness of civil society, the fragility and fluidity of top-down created elite parties, taking into account the undeniable facts of electoral volatility, rapidly changing partisan identities and party landscapes, the low level of partisan identification in the electorate, there is a strong tendency in the research of post-communist political systems to concentrate on the actors' logic, on institutions and on quantitative empirical research neglecting the questions of systemic logic, avoiding theoretical synthesis. (Von Beyme) One may refer either to the 'It is too early, to make generalizations' type of argument, or to the overriding importance of international determinism in the light of which it does not seem to matter much how national parties relate to domestic cleavages, Their subjective capacity to respond and to adjust to external pressures and exigencies is decisive. Thus, in contrast to Western political science with a more-or-less equilibrium of the two currents and with an ever increasing effort to combine these approaches, we are confronted here in Hungary and most other East Central European (ECE) countries with a bias of political science toward actor-centred institutionalism and empirism. We might mention a very special Hungarian phenomenon standing in the way of progress towards a theoretical synthesis. Not only parties, political actors are divided along sharp ideological lines, but social and political scientists, as well, especially when they try to play political roles. Even opinion poll makers are often divided along lines of partisan competition. Political scientists committed to some kind of a normative description of the party system build their ideology - without being explicit - into their constructs and the dialogue, similarly which could bring about a kind of synthesis is missing. Politics Between Economy and Culture Our approach to be pursued in this study is to rely on the classical cleavage and party theory of Stein Rokkan linked with the work of S. M. Lipset. We want to test the applicability of their theory to party formation, to the question of the cleavage basis of the party system and of the freezing of political alternatives in post-communist Hungary. We aim to come to some conclusions concerning the dynamics of party politics and the role of underlying cleavages and cleavage families. As a consequence of the early death of S. Rokkan, his work, in spite its richness and extension, can not be regarded as finished. In the following, we point to some of his basic ideas which have guided this research. 1. Territory as a key concept of politics in a cross pressure between culture and economy, implying: - the equal weight given to economic, political-territorial and cultural dimensions; - the interaction between geographical spaces and socio-cultural membership spaces, between center formation and boundary building; - the conceptual map of Europe with an West-East axis differentiating between economic conditions for state-building and a South-North axis between cultural conditions for nation-building. 2. The identification of four cleavages following the critical junctures of: - the national revolution creating the center-periphery and the church-state cleavages; - the industrial revolution creating the urban-rural and the labour-capital cleavages. 3. The cyclical movement of cleavages: towards a national-international divide. It is often forgotten that Rokkan does not end his cleavage sequence with the 'worker-owner' conflict of the 'industrial revolution', but points to 'an intriguing cyclical movement': - breakdown of a supranational order (Roman Empire) - establishment of culturally and politically distinctive nation states - 'conflict over national versus international loyalties'. (Lipset-Rokkan 47-48) Although the last formulation relates to the 'communist' cleavage within the labour movement (not relevant any more), but in his latest works he points to the centrality of a reformulated version of a center-periphery divide: that between homogenizing supranational standardization and cultural distinctiveness, roots, national identity. ( Rokkan- Urwin, Flora 1983: 434) 4. The different political impacts of a gradual, organic sequence of cleavages ( in most of North Western Europe) versus the cumulation of state and nation-building cleavages together with the rapidity of enfranchisement and sudden modernization. The second alternative - especially in the case of the discontinuity of or threats to national independence - implies difficulties in transition to mass democracy. (Hungary is directly mentioned by Rokkan in this latter context.) (Flora 1983: 22) "Territorial-cultural conflicts do not just find political expression in secessionist and irredentist movements, however, they feed into the overall cleavage structure ... and help to condition the development not only of each ... party organization but even more of the entire system of party oppositions and interests" (Lipset-Rokkan 41). The historical long term continuity of collective political identities coalitions and oppositions on the level of alternatives, of parties and of the support market to be mobilized "Parties do not simply present themselves de novo to the citizens at each election; they each have a history and so have the constellations of alternatives they present to the electorate." (Lipset-Rokkan: 2)Emerging cleavages affect, however, former alliances and restructure the party system. Rokkan points also to the existence of a certain lee-way for parties to translate social cleavages. Rokkan and Lipset - without detailed explanation - hinted at "the possibility that the parties themselves might establish themselves as significant poles of attraction and produce their alignments independently of the geographical, the social and the cultural underpinnings of the movements." (Lipset-Rokkan 3) This question is taken up by G. Sartori developing it into the concept of the autonomy of parties in channeling, selecting, subduing or mishandling cleavages. 6. The freezing of party alternatives with the final extension of suffrage (mostly in the twenties), implying the inclusion of the lower classes. In contrast to an expanding support market with a creative phase of parties (Cotta 102) accompanied by a mobilization along cultural and territorial cleavages, the mobilization on the basis of purely economic cleavages comes only afterwards (Rokkan 1980: 118)The stage of mass democracy brings about an ever more closed electoral market with a mobilization controlled by the already existing parties. As a kind of a particular development, Rokkan also refers to the possibility of the discontinuity or disruption of party alternatives in contrast to the continuity of political alternatives (France, Germany, Italy) (Lipset-Rokkan: 53) 7. The special role of social democratic parties on the left side of the labour-capital cleavage. Due to their strength and "domesticability", their 'ability to maintain unity in the face of the many forces making for division and fragmentation' (Lipset-Rokkan: 46)., social democratic parties and the class cleavage in itself played a stabilizing and homogenizing, cohesive influence in most West European party systems.(In the golden post-war decades of industrial society, at least...) In countries with a troubled history of nation-building, marked cultural cleavages reduced their potentials. But the very logic of pluralism in democratic capitalism helped their entry into national politics. These parties, "having joined the nation" contributed to the neutralization of the radicalizing effects of sudden industrialization. (Lipset-Rokkan: 46, 48, 50) 8. The 'radical rightist' anti-system cleavage. "...The rising networks of new elites, such as the leaders of the new large bureaucracies of industry and government, those who control the various sectors of the communication industry, the heads of mass organizations, the leaders ... of once weak or low-status groups, and the like..." constitute the focus of protest of fascist-type parties, which: - are nationalistic, they "venerate" the nation and its culture; - are anti-democratic; - want to unite their supporters as one single 'pillar' lead by "deeply felt convictions about the destiny and the mission of the nation". These xenophobic and racist parties may mobilize segments of the middle and lower classes. As to their emergence and chances of success, "'contrasts in the continuity and regularity of nation-building certainly played a role" (Lipset-Rokkan 23, 24, 25). The tabula rasa hypothesis Before trying to test the applicability of the Rokkanian theses to the Hungarian post-communist party landscape, let us outline the antithesis contradicting to our assumptions in favor of a qualified, i.e. not a literal, but a substantive application of the Rokkanian model to Hungary. In contrast to L.-D. Seiler's insistence concerning the relevance of the conceptual framework of Rokkan after the implosion of the Soviet Empire and a 'classical' cleavage structure in post-communist party systems (Seiler 1993, 1995), there is a school of the tabula rasa hypothesis (Markowski 1997: 247, Kitschelt 1995: 450). This line of argumentation accentuates the lack of historic cleavage dimensions, the absence or weakness of social cleavages, the chaotic socio-economic environment, the fluidity of economic relations, the cacophony of political entrepreneurs, civilizational incompetence and an international environment which has little room for alternatives. The electoral market is open and available. (Mair 1997) Programmatic differences are just window-dressing. (Bialasiak 1997: 25, Kitschelt 1995: 450-452) "What is perhaps most striking about new party systems which are currently emerging in post-communist Europe, is precisely their lack of systemness... And it is this very absence, in turn, which is likely to play such a crucial role in encouraging and facilitating electoral instability. At the very least, it is clear that the combination of a weak cleavage structure, an uncertain and volatile institutional environment, and a very open and unpredictable structure of competition cannot enhance the prospect of rapid consolidation." (Mair 1997: 192) These are heavy sentences implying a hard judgment written down by one of Europe's leading party researchers. Of course, there is some truth in arguments like this. But we observe here an over-generalization and a lack of differentiation. Similarly to the counterargument and corrections put forward by other authors (Bielasiak, Cotta, Kitschelt, Comisso), one can point to the following facts, factors conditions and options: - the learning process of political actors and of the electorate; - crystallization processes in political structures, progress in the economy; - the consolidating influence of the international environment; - the length of system time. There are country differences regarding: - civilizational competence; - economic and social indicators; - the location on the geopolitical map; - the embeddedness into international organizations; - the structure of authoritarian rule and the type of transition; - pre-communist political history; - timing and mode of modernization; - history of statehood and nation-building. Some of the factors concerning volatility, changing partisan identities, changes and transformations in the party structure and the underlying cleavages may more or less resemble recent changes in mature democracies. We go as far as to point to the possibility that East Central European (ECE) democracies with the dominance of cultural politics. might even anticipate some tendencies latent in developed, mature democracies in a context of globalization and post-industrial civilization. (De Waele 880) We find, however, that there are important arguments in Peter Mair's analysis for the understanding of the cleavage basis of party competition in ECE. One is connected with the functional over load thesis (Offe 1991, Bielasak 1997: 24): too many issues (national identity, economic transformation, social structure etc.) are to be addressed simultaneously. This is a difficulty for forming structured political identities. Especially when the players themselves determine the rules of the game with which it will be decided who will be a fellow player. For Mair, this is 'system-building' with power itself as a stake too high. He concludes: since it is a lot to play for, competition will be so intense that the party system will be inherently unstable. (Mair 1997: 196-197). Party theory and the Hungarian experience Confronting our findings (to be discussed in the following in a more detailed analytical description), we can come to the following conclusion: a substantive application of the classical Rokkanian framework combined with an evolutionary process understanding of the Hungarian party system may render explanatory power. In this sense, we formulate our assumptions. The evolution of the Hungarian party system confirms the classical sequence of European cleavage formation with the initial and decisive emergence of identity-based territorial and cultural divides followed later by the appearance of economic cleavages. The salient expression and cumulation of cultural and territorial cleavages with their dominance over socio-economic divides in the party system corresponds clearly with the cyclical movement in the framework of the Rokkanian scheme manifesting now globally the centrality of a national-supranational divide (Touraine). Hungarian party competition seems to reflect and even to anticipate new developments of Western party systems. There are real historical alternatives expressing different conceptions of modernization, of nationhood and of geopolitical location represented by the parties. These alternatives are older than the electorate, but in their political representation they deviate from the mainstream in Western Europe: we find no direct link between the changing parties and the frozen alternatives. For Hungary and other ECE countries, 1989 (or the period 1998 - 19990) can be looked upon as a Rokkaninan critical juncture whith basic decions concerning internal strucures (transition from authoritarian rule to multipary democracy and the transformation of 'real socialism into capitalism) and external boundaries (geoeconomic orientation into the world market, and into the Western alliance, and more specificallly into the European Community). Thus, we have to do with a particular form of 'freezing'. (Flora 1999: 10) For Rokkan and Lipset, party alternatives and the party system itself freeze. In Hungary and in some other ECE countries, e.g. in Poland (Tworzecki) parties, partisan identities change in rather short intervals, parties are fluid. But the alternatives contained in the cleavage structure are amazingly stable: not the party system, but the cleavage structure is frozen. In the formation process of the parties (1988-89), in the subsequent three elections from 1990 to 1998, the same cleavage sets have mattered and structured party competition, namely: the three cleavage families of Westernization vs. traditionalism, post-communism vs. anti-post-communism and pro-market commodification (winners) vs. welfare statist decommodification (losers). While in Western democracies parties are rooted in cleavages, to be more exact, are tied to distinct cleavage sides most Hungarian parties are either in search for social and cultural cleavages to embark upon, even crossing the cleavage lines, or are rooted in opposite cleavage sides. Thus, Sartori's thesis about the autonomy of actors in structuring the political space also has a strong explanatory power for Hungarian politics. This flux of party identities is, in recent years, to a certain extent, a tendency present in West European party systems, as globalization and the emergence of an information society transforms the cleavage basis of the established party systems.(Touraine, Castels) The evolutionary process of party politics in Hungary goes in the direction of more structure, more system, and mutually reinforcing cleavages. (whether this implies more democracy or elements of authoritarianism, can be considered a normative question.) This special freezing of alternatives and cleavages has, however, taken place in the context of a very much open and available electoral market. This deviance from the general freezing pattern is the unavoidable consequence of the long discontinuity of the party system, the lack of traditions of mass democracy and the interest structure of society in the making. Although there are some sociological and demographic explanatory factors of party support, the overall tendency is volatility, an extremely low degree of party identification coupled with an inherited non-participatory political culture with apathy or even hostility towards parties.(Gazsó-Stumpf, Körösényi 1998) Parallel with the tendency of realignment, i.e. clearer poles, and of alignment on the level of political actors, we also observe a massive dealignment on the level of (non-)voters. Due to the strong economic, social, cultural and political positions of the post-communist elites and surviving value orientations in the electorate, 'the definition of the rules of the game" as a systemic issue (Offe 1991, Mair 1997) is expressed by the salience of a 'post-communism - anti-post-communism' cleavage family. The taming of capitalism, the political regulation of the market with a political mobilization along a commodification - decommodification axis is a crucial point of social cohesion and legitimacy. Following from the freezing of the Hungarian political cleavage structure in the phase of the dominance of the cultural-territorial and post-communist cleavage families, the increasing importance of this socio-economic divide is not properly represented in cleavage-related party politics. The post-1989 evolution of the Hungarian party system has brought about no political mobilization along the line of a classical labor-capital class cleavage. Instead, we have observed the following attempts for bringing the welfare statist decommodification cleavage in: - coupling it with nostalgy for goulash communism, i.e.the post-communist cleavage as the defense or restoration of certain pre-1989 structures and values and with the contradictory evolutionary transformation of the post-communist Socialist Party being a member of the transnational political family of social democracy, on one hand, and the party of radical adjustment to global markets, on the other; - coupling it with the defense of national identity, a national path of modernization in face of a global supranational capitalism, in form of a stronger representation of nationhood and the nation state; - coupling it with the religious cleavage, with Christian values, especially in a context, in which there is a correlation between poverty, marginalization and church-going frequency; - coupling its radical variant (anticapitalism) with an aggressive, xenophobic, authoritarian and fundamentalist social nationalism as the post-communist equivalent of e.g. the French frontism of Le Pen. Cleavage structure in Hungary We have already pointed to and shall later discuss extensively our own typology of cleavages for Hungary and presumably also for other ECE countries: 1. The cultural system: the family of territorial and cultural cleavages Traditionalist forces stress historical continuity, Hungarian nationhood, favour community over society, are for strong authority, centralizing governace, strong church. Their value orientations are more particularist than universalist, they have an inclination 'to love the rural', even if they are urban They are divided beween radical anti-globalist chauvinists and national modernizers accepting - though sceptically - globalization trying to maximize the maneuvring room of the nation state. Westernizers are outward-looking, for catch-up modernization, they favour individualism, multi-cultural diversity, they stress secularism and human rights. 2. The political system: the family of post-communist cleavages This set of cleavages has several dimensions - an ideological dimension of anticommunism which can be based either on particularist national, religious identities or on the universalism of individual human rights and rationality; - a political dimension expressed in the relationship to the Socialist Party looked upon as the successor party; - a power dimension of competing elites and of the re-definition of the rules of the game outside and inside politics; - a structural dimension reflecting the symbiotic dualism of the present society with a sector rooted in late communism and a sector of emerging capitalism ;- an emotional and biographical dimension with a population split into two halves: one half who feel they lived better in the last years of 'real socialism' and another half thinking differently. 3. The economic systemí. the family of socio-economic cleavages With economic transformation progressing and with an overwhelmingly materialist electorate this set of cleavages has become central in the society, but the early freezing of the party system structured along the cultural and political cleavage sets is still complicating the clear translation of this divide into programmatic and public policy alternatives. One pole of this cleavage family is radical commodification, deregulation with a high speed and broad extension of marketization, privatization, a primary market distribution of wealth and incomes with marked inequalities, the other is the limitation of the market, a certain measure of decommodification with extended welfare statism, with an active and strong state regulating the economy, helping the poor, enhancing mobility and broad middle classes. The Hungarian party system - inspite of self-locations and self-definitions - can hardly be adequately described in the traditional terms of a Left-Right continuum, since what can be termed as culturally "Left" is often paired with "rightist" socio-economic positions and vica versa: nationalists, antri-(post)-communists are more in favor of state redistribution. Cleavage-based party identities Before briefly describing the parties that have become 'national players' in the period from 1988 and 1998 and trying to locate them in our cleavage scheme, we underline a specific paradox: parallel with the intensive and polarizing competition along cleavage axes between party blocs and parties, there is a contradictory heterogeneity, not only among the electoral segments supporting the individual parties but in the parties as well including elites and rank-and-file membership, cleaving the parties themselves along the basic faultlines of political competition. In the longer run, however, there is a tendency towards the clarification of party identities and a reduction of the number of the main political actors.From 1998 on there is an increasing tendeny for bipolarity: the Socialists taking up the position of intensively incorporating the country into supranational structures, not fearing Kulturübernahme ,i.e. is the take-over of Westerm patterns of social life, while FIDESZ is appealing to those who want to protect national identity and souvereignty within a system of global capitalism. Another paradox is the over-competitiveness of the party system versus a consensus oriented citizenry. The Alliance of Free Democrats - Szabad Demokraták Szövetsége (SZDSZ) The constant element of SZDSZ is its commitment to radical Westernization with decisively anti-nationalist, secularist individualist and human rights centered positions of social libertarianism. The party is rooted in the Budapest centered intellectual dissident movement, the Democratic Opposition. This gave the party a strong anti-communist, anti-post-communist impetus in the beginning. Responding to nationalist tendencies in the governing parties of the traditionalist camp, it came close to the Socialists and in 1994 as junior partner joined the government lead by the post-communists. As to the socio-economic set of cleavages, it has represented a neo-liberal radical commodification policy option.The 19994 - 1998 coalition with the Socialist was detrimental to a broad segnment of supporters, bringing about a sharp decline in support. Parliamentary seats (out of 386): 1990: 92 1994: 69 1998: 24 Hungarian Democratic Forum - Magyar Demokrata Fórum (MDF) For long, MDF was the hegemonic party of the traditionalist camp uniting popular nationalists and pro-European modernizing patriots. It was ready at first to make compromises with national minded post-communists. Responding to the successful anti-communism of the early SZDSZ, it went over to a radical anti-communist position. As to the socio-economic set of cleavages, a soft version of commodification prevailed. Splits by militant nationalists and by pragmatic moderates, the traumatic experience of the 1994 defeat, permanent tensions between a more radical membership and a less radical leadership has weakened the party.By now the party has rediscovered its origins as "a quiet force" and is resissting the aggressiveness of Fidesz. Parliamentary seats: 1990: 164 1994: 38 1998: 17 Christian Democratic People's Party - Kereszténydemokrata Néppárt (KDNP) A traditionalist historical party strongly rooted in a narrow - rural and aging - Catholic subculture became a satellite of the governing MDF. An anti-communist profile was combined with welfare statist positions.After the 1994 electoral defeat the search for a more characteristic party identity lead to a self-destructing clash between moderates and radicals. The latter won the battle and located the party close to the militant nationalist forces on the platform of social nationalism. The same leaders, out of Parliament now, has started a flirt with the socialists. Parliamentary seats: 1990: 21 1994: 22 1998: 0 Party of Hungarian Truth and Life - Magyar Igazság és Élet Pártja (MIÉP) A party founded in 1993 by I. Csurka, former vice-president of the MDF on the basis of a neonazi ideology offered by intellectuals and appealing to frustrated losers of the middle and lower strata. It is a party of social nationalism, relatively strong in the capital and its agglomeration, and among the younger generation, combining anti-Western, racist and anti-communist positions with the vision of a de-commodifying strong 'nation building state'. Being an opposition party by definition, it tacitly supports the Fidesz government, especially in the field of culture. Parliamentary seats: 1994: 0 1998: 14 Hungarian Democratic People's Party - Magyar Demokrata Néppárt (MDNP) A party founded in early 1996 by MPs of the MDF on the basis of a pragmatic anti-radicalism on the ideals of West European Christian Democracy. Staying on the platform of 'soft traditionalism' 'soft anti-post-communism', and 'soft commodification' occupying a centrist place in an over-competitive party system they severely failed in 1998. Parliamentary seats: 1996: 15 (MDF mandates) 1998: 0 Independent Smallholders', Land Workers' and Bourgeois Party - Független Kisgazda Földmunkás és Polgári Párt (FKGP) This historically significant agrarian party joined the traditionalist government coalition in 1990 as a force with national-Christian and anti-communist identity and a single-issue position of full reprivatization in the dimension of socio-economic cleavages. The decision of party leader J. Torgyán to leave the government in 1992 was followed by fierce fractional struggles and splits. Although the majority of MPs, excluded from the party, continued to support the government, Torgyán was able to control the party and to transform it into a rural based general protest party of social nationalism. Its charismatic, but at the same time unacconntable leader defines the party at least as much as its cleavage basis. After a period of long anti-cosmopolitan, anti-communist and economically extremely populist radical mobilization, there are some signs of self-restraint and move to the center. Patronage and clientelism permeat the party leader and his entourage. Parliamentary seats: 1990: 44 1994: 24 1998: 48 Hungarian Socialist Party - Magyar Szocialista Párt (MSZP) Growing out of the reformist wing of the former state party this conglomerate party very strongly cleaved in itself is embedded in the post-communist cleavage family in a double sense: as to membership and supporters, political culture, traditions of informal decision-making, clientelistic relations, it is rooted in the surviving late-Kádárian sector of the Hungarian society. At the same time it is intertwined with mighty segments of the economic, financial and professional elites running the sector of emerging capitalism. As to the way and style of policy-making, there are also rival late-Kádárian and anti-Kádárian groups in the party. In the dimension of the territorial-cultural cleavages, from 1995, the party has practically become the leading force of radical Westernization. As to the location of the party in the socio-economic cleavage, there is a marked contrast between the policy of radical commodification pursued from 1995, on one side, and the actual welfare statist preferences of the majority of its voters corresponding more to the social democratic self-definition of the MSZP.In the context of the confrontative Fidesz government stategy, the MSZP -- being strobgly cleaved ideologically and sociologically – is strongly championing for concensual democracy. Parliamentary seats: 1990: 33 1994: 209 1998: 134 Workers' Party - Munkáspárt (MP) Being the continuation of the orthodox wing of the former state party with a new reform communist image the MP is firmly rooted in the corresponding cleavage family and takes the adequate anti-commodification, i.e. welfare statist side, critical of capitalism, of privatization. Its location in the cultural-territorial cleavage dimension is contradictory: its nationalism is paired with anti-clericalism. MIÉP and MP are equally committed opponents to Hungarian NATO membership. MP has no representation in the Parliament, receives, however, a permanent 3,5-4% of the votes. Alliance of Young Democrats - Hungarian Civic* Party - Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége - Magyar Polgári Párt (FIDESZ-MPP) We might call FIDESZ a strategic party, a free-rider of political cleavages, in the meaning that its cleavage roots, membership basis and organizations are weak but it is consciously looking for the social and cultural cleavages enabling it to occupy a political space with the best chance of collecting a majority of votes and getting into the gravitational center of the party system. At the point of its establishment by fresh university graduates (mainly coming from the faculty of law) FIDESZ had just two fixed points: its radical opposition to the communist regime and the protection of its organizational autonomy. (Bozóki-Javornicky-Stumpf 1998: 106) In the context of the cultural divide between SZDSZ 'urban' westernizers and MDF national-popular traditionalists they declared first to be the children of divorced parents. This corresponded also to their social background: they were mostly first generation intellectuals coming from 'the province'. When they had decided, however, that liberalism was the ideology most distant from communism, they became radical westernizers, secular, alternative, actionist, anti-nationalist. This brought them as close to SZDSZ that they got looked upon as 'the younger brothers and sisters' of the Free Democrats. When the 'cultural struggle' resulted in a rapprochement between SZDSZ and MSZP, they first reiterated their standing above the cultural divide. Realizing that there was no space for centrists in a system of cultural politics, they crossed the cleavage line and defined themselves as a party of national liberalism. Seeing the vacuum on the side of moderate Christian Democratic parties, they came to stress Christian values. They have arrived at an intermediate position of 'soft westernization' or national modernization. There is a very stong symbolic component of nationalism and clericalism legitimizing the very active cilentele-building of the party. In opposition to the soft market liberal approach of the governing MDF they had chosen to be strongly market liberals in a very pragmatic fashion. Later, they responded, however, to the neoliberal monetarism of the MSZP-SZDSZ coalition by stressing social protection and growth induction arriving at the position of 'soft commodification', guided by a strong and active state. Parliamentary seats: 1990: 21* 1994: 20 1998: 148 Empirical validity Our theoretical model has been validated by empirical investigations. British scholars relying on an extensive data basis and sophisticated mathematical methods confirmed the strength of elite issue cleavages and found "rigorous support for Márkus' claim for the preeminence of broadly cultural and national issues in structuring mass ideology in Hungary, at least in the early stages of the transition " (Evans-Whitefield 1995:1184). Before coming to a more detailed investigation of the post-1989 party landscape, in the next chapter we shall deal with the past, with the impact of actual party politics on the long lines in the history of Hungarian state and nation building the location of the country on the conceptual map of Europe the particular features of modernization the pre-communist political and party systems the nature of the communist rule the pre-conditions of the transition. REFERENCES 1 An extensive bibliography of S. Rokkan’s works is contained in Rokkan 1980, Flora 1981 and 1999. 2 Although in the last twenty years – refering to the emergence of a post-materialist – materialist divide (Inglehart) to the apparance of a new type of right-wing radicalism, some authors speak of unfreezing (Cotta: 103), while others defend the freezing hypothesis. (Bartoloni-Mair) 3 Our scheme of the Hungarian cleavage structure was originally elaborated in early 1990, before the first free elections. (Márkus Gy. 1990, 1992) It stands close to the concept of C. Offe (Offe 1996). 4 This idea of a dualist structure as a cleavage basis was put firward by M. Bernhard. See also the party descriptions by A. Körösényi (1998: 76-88) and A. Ágh, Z. Ferencz, S. Kurtán, L. Szarvas and G. Török in Népszabadság, March 21, 28, April 4, 11, 18, 25 and May 2. 1998. The texts of the following two chapters are based on th eauthor's contributonto the book edtited by Kay Lawson et al. 'Cleavages, Parties, and Voters", Praeger, Wesport, 1999.61-77, l44-159. CHAPTER TWO The Historical Dimension: Hungarian Cleavages and Parties Prior to 1989 TERRITORIAL IDENTITY Although their original analysis did not include Eastern Europe nor the territorial consequences of two world wars, the theoretical work of Stein Rokkan and Seymour Martin Lipset permits us to put Hungarian regime change into a broader historical and territorial perspective and arrive at a better understanding of the changes that have taken place, the nature of past and present cleavages, and, most importantly for our present purposes, the party systems that have evolved (Lipset and Rokkan 1967; Flora 1983: 19). The successive collapses of the Ottoman, Austrian and Russian empires brought about major changes in the conditions of state and nation building in the region east of the Germanic territories (Flora 1983: 19) Territorial consolidation, external boundaries, the administrative and cultural penetration of territories have all become open problems in a context of huge socio-economic dislocation, deprivation, inequality and ideological vacuum. Following the collapse of the Soviet dominated Eastern bloc and of the Soviet empire, in a geographical space where the fit between state and nation has traditionally been unstable, the struggle between center and periphery has inevitably become the dominant cleavage, a cleavage linked to conflicting cultural, linguistic, religious, ethnic and economic claims and exacerbated by economic collapse. It is important, however, to distinguish between Eastern Europe proper and the countries of the interface periphery or buffer zone caught in cross-pressures between major state-building centers (Flora 1983: 19). Thus we come to the distinct category of East Central Europe, a region whose structural traits reflect a historically changing mix of West and East European components (Szűcs 1990; Bibó 1992). In Eastern and South Eastern Europe the emerging political landscape is characterized by a center-periphery cleavage between we and they groups of primordial identities - and ruling Communist parties did not hesitate to take up ethno-nationalist and/or imperialist issues. In (East) Central Europe cultural politics1 evolved as a key factor in the cleavage between center and periphery, as parties formed around the question of territorial and national response to the gravitational attraction of the Western world or global triad capitalism. In response to the universalist standardizing traits of democratic capitalism adopted by the center, the political actors of the periphery have become culturally divided between those ready to make a radical adjustment and those determined to defend separate national identities. The domestic political landscape of post-communist societies is further complicated by the fact that the ruling national and multinational political institutions of the West have failed to develop an adequate strategy for responding either to the region as whole or to the individual countries, a situation in sharp contrast to the clear and material commitment of the allied powers for the democratization and reconstruction of West Germany, Italy and Japan after World War II. The major cause of this failure is bad timing, i.e., the fact that the changes in the East have taken place during an era when the Western world is facing a deep and painful process of transformation, due to the emergence of a post-industrial civilization, of post-modernity, and of a general trend to globalization undermining the traditional role of the nation state. The prevailing and dominating neo-liberal monetarist paradigm had special disruptive effects for Eastern countries. The decline of industrial society carries with it the decline of the centrality of the class cleavage. Territorial and cultural cleavages become ever more dominant. A centralizing system of standardization comes into conflict with the protection of cultural distinctiveness and the autonomy of individual countries and regions. Universalism wars with particularism (Rokkan 1982; Touraine 1992). At the same time, an urban-rural (center-periphery) cleavage coinciding with a federalist versus anti-federalist cleavage is gaining strength at the level of Europe and within the E.U. member nations (Andeweg 1995). These contemporary complications arise out of a yet more complicated past. Nowhere is the past more complex and more powerfully significant in explaining contemporary cleavages and parties than in Hungary, as we seek to explain in the present chapter. THE EVOLUTION OF CLEAVAGES The location of Hungary in a geopolitical buffer zone or interface periphery has resulted in a permanent instability in the processes of state-formation and nation-building and these discontinuities and disruptions have had their impact on collective memory. Conquered by the Ottomans, then subject to Habsburg rule, then defeated (in 1848-49) in the revolutionary quest for independence, Hungary did not achieve even semi-independence until 1867, when a compromise solution gave the Hungarian polity a measure of autonomy within the Habsburg monarchy. The party landscape prior to World War I was characterized by the division between those who accepted the Austro-Hungarian compromise and those who continued the quest for national independence. As in other regions with a history of absolutist feudal regimes constraining bourgeois and civil development, national identity preceded the nation state, and brought with it early forms of cultural politics. Those who aspired to national emancipation often became opposed to socio-economic modernization, perceived as something alien. As early as the rule of Joseph II (1780-1790) when a programme of enlightened absolutism coupled social modernization with cultural Germanization, and continuing during the first years of the nineteenth century, the two ideas became ever more clearly opposed, however diligently the slogan Fatherland and Progress may have been brandished about. As Count István Széchenyi, the great reformer of the nineteenth century pointed out, anyone who tried to cooperate with Vienna in the interest of national bourgeois development, the de facto politicians of the Vienna air, were labeled traitors by the ex principio patriots of the Hortobágy puszta (steppes east of the Danube) (Quoted by K. Kulcsár, Magyar Nemzet, December 23 1989). The cleavage between modernization and nationalistic traditionalism expressed a real development, rooted in the very substance of modernization as a historical, social and cultural process, a process of social change whereby less developed societies acquire characteristics common to more developed societies.(Lerner 1968) The question was how best to combine the universal with the particular, the past with a vision of the future, the patterns provided by tradition with the blueprints offered by others, the existent dependence and the hoped for sovereignty (Gerschenkron 1962). The cleavage has not always been sharp and clearly defined. At some points of history, as in the reform age preceding 1848, and again during the bourgeois and national revolution of 1848/49 itself, modernist and patriotic forces could ally or even merge. Traditionalists have sometimes supported a type of modernization which - as an alternative to catch-up adjustment - focuses on preserving national cultural values and identities, as in Japan. Moderate traditionalists both prior to and after 1989 have claimed to seek to select those techniques of modernization which correspond to our awareness of tradition, our experience of identity and may relate to external models with obligatory suspicion. (Kulin 1995) Traditionalists stress Hungarian nationhood above all, and favor strong authority, a strong church, and the community. Traditionalism has not been confined to a single class, nor to the clergy. Traditionalists included populists (or narodniks) as well as all those who favor Gemeinschaft (community) over Gesellschaft (society), those who are inward-looking, and those who draw their arguments from history and poetry are all traditionalists. Traditionalists were traumatized by the Versailles treaty of 1920 (the trauma of Trianon) and have never abandoned the dream of bringing all Hungarians back together. Westernizers, on the other hand, have been more likely to favor catch-up modernization and individualism, multicultural diversity, a secular state, and human rights. They have been outward-looking, drawing their arguments from sociology and seeking the development of the civil society. Westernizers have been readier to accept given (imposed) boundaries and treat the problem of Hungarians living elsewhere basically as a human rights problem. In contrast to party stabilization on the basis of structured cleavages in the West, party formation in Hungary was an enterprise of elite networks. In this tradition parties have emerged as intellectual “milieu parties” in which the collective memory, the common language and aesthetic taste of the relevant subculture were more important than the substantive content of party programs. Two characteristic features arise from this type of party formation. The first is “pre-modern”: party struggles have a “tribal” character, with strong emotionalization. Psychological factors, in particular subjective prejudices and sympathies, are permanently entrenched. The second trait can be seen as “post-modern”: parties have unclear profiles and do not offer clear cut policy alternatives; instead, they sell themselves to the electorate by marketing their distinct aesthetic images through the mass media. Thus the Hungarian party landscape was characterized by the dominance of cultural politics.1 The central cleavage of traditionalism versus westernization was, to be more exact, a cumulation of cultural and territorial cleavages. Yet the Hungarian citizens themselves consistently maintain overwhelmingly materialist value orientations, and socio-economic issues have consistently been both urgent and central. How has it been possible for cultural politics to assume such primacy? How can we explain the weight of history in shaping party formation and party competition? The Prolongation of the East Roman Empire As we learn from the work of Stein Rokkan and S. M. Lipset, the political history of (Western) Europe with its critical junctures of the national and industrial revolutions is the consequence of the collapse of the Roman Empire, more precisely of the West Roman Empire. Rokkan identifies Europe with the domain of the Roman Catholic Church after the schism of 1054. This excludes the Eastern areas in the domain of the Orthodox Church, above all the Russian Empire, which was economically isolated from the Western city belt and culturally encapsulated through the subjugation of the church by the state. We are inclined to believe that the Russian Empire was in fact the successor supranational colonial power of the East Roman Empire2. Thus the formation of the Soviet Union, and its eventual formal takeover of Eastern and Central Europe at the end of World War II was the continuation and strengthening of Russian hegemony in the area. But this hegemony, however powerful, never established itself smoothly over the eastern territories of the former Roman Empire. Territorial consolidation, changing external boundaries, and administrative and cultural penetration of constituent territories were always problematic; ever increasing socio-economic dislocations, deprivation and inequality made them more so. In a geographical space where the fit between states and nations has always been unstable, conflicting claims of cultural, linguistic, religious, and ethnic rights, i.e., cultural politics, quite naturally assumed ascendancy. Beginning as a medieval imperial state, with large territories falling to the Turks and then the whole country coming under Habsburg rule, producing a long string of failed uprisings and revolutions, severely truncated when it lost a third of its population and two thirds of its territory after World War I, allying with Nazi Germany out of revisionist aspirations that led only to occupation, falling under Soviet domination, and then subject to the cruel repression of the national uprising in 1956, Hungary has had a history which has inevitably heightened consciousness of ethnic vulnerability and fear of extinction. But it must be added that this feeling is not a manifest collective memory. Such anxieties have been largely restricted to one part of the cultural elite and have been in sharp contrast to the pragmatic-materialistic attitudes of the population. Exogenous Modernization and Dualist Social Structures In Hungary, ever since the days of Joseph II, the enlightened Habsburg emperor, the response to the advance of the West has been divided along cultural lines. The division between those giving priority to the Fatherland or to Progress in the beginning, between tradition and modernization in the more recent past, has always been a cultural division. From Germany to Russia, cultural and political currents - Slavophiles and Zapadniks, adherents and opponents of a Sonderweg (a special national development path deviant from the universal Western-type of development) - emerged along this cleavage. This remained true even throughout the communist era. Opposition to Communism was naturally organized and divided according to these complementary and contradictory principles: human rights activist Sakharov and the writer Solzhenytsin in Russia, the Polish Committee for the Defense of Workers (KOR) and the Church in Poland, urbanists and populists in Hungary This centuries-old cultural struggle (Kulturkampf) along the lines of territorial and cultural cleavages is rooted in a particular (Hungarian and regional) type of social structure in the course of (semi-)exogenous modernization. Hungarian sociologists and historians describe this pattern by the term dualist social structures, (Erdei 1987). meaning the coexistence of functions between a feudal traditional sector (including historical upper and middle classes, historical cultural elites) and a bourgeois sector (capitalist upper and middle strata, urban intellectuals, and cultural elites) mainly recruited from ethnic subcultures. This kind of dualist society is typical of backward societies facing external challenges of capitalist development. As S.M. Lipset has shown, cultural or ethnic minorities outside the national core group, groups of sociological deviants who have not been fully integrated into society, often play a strong innovative role when such challenges must be met, particularly when the dominant group is itself dominated by traditional values that contradict the requirements of economic, cultural and political modernization. This type of non-organic modernization is, however, extremely vulnerable to political attacks from those who maintain traditional values (Lipset 1969: 98). In Hungary the Jews first of all, then the German-speaking population and, to some extent, smaller cultural-ethnic minorities such as the Armenians and the Greeks became the equivalent of the innovative sociological deviants described by Lipset. The preconditions of the special role of Jewry in all fields of modernization were given in their inherited cultural traditions conducive to embourgeoisement, in their presence in the spheres of finance and commerce and in the free professions - as a result of their exclusion from the feudal and estate-centered society - and in their linguistic and cultural assimilation. Their many contributions to Hungarian culture and science were also important. Even more apropros was the consistent involvement of so many Hungarian citizens of Jewish origin in radical progressive and leftist thought and political movements, especially manifest in the heavy Jewish overrepresentation in the failed Soviet type Council Republic of 1919, continuing into the Communist Party leadership between 1945-1956, and evident also as a very significant weight in the 1956 revolution and in the later anti-regime opposition. THE EVOLUTION OF THE PARTIES Parties of the Dualist Period (1867-1918) The formative period of a party system in Hungary can be dated to the years around 1867, after the completion of the Austrian-Hungarian compromise following the defeat of the 1848-1849 freedom fight. The period between 1867 and 1918, i.e. the end of World War I and the collapse of the Dual Monarchy, can be characterized from the point of view of our investigations as that of constitutional politics. The parties that emerged were neither ideological nor class parties. The centuries-old cultural and territorial divide between adherents of inward-looking identity based on national traditionalism and those favoring outward-looking pro-Western catch-up modernization reappeared, dressed up as the constitutional struggle of parties over the issues of the standing of Hungary in the Monarchy and of maintaining, restoring and/or extending statehood. In this struggle, the years themselves came to stand for partisan identities: 1867 meant standing for the status quo of the compromise; 1848 stood for the initial stage of the freedom fight and bourgeois revolution as an organic continuation of the reform age of the thirties and forties; 1849 indicated the second and final year of the national struggle escalating to the dethroning of the Habsburgs. Thus, the original faultline separated the governing Deák Party (led by Ferenc Deák, the architect of the compromise) from the pro-independence opposition defending the principles of 1848 and 1849. However, as a political divide, ‘1867’ was not a realistic cause for oppposition, inasmuch as no viable alternative was or could be proposed. On the one hand, the Hungarian parliament had neither the right nor the power to bring about change. On the other hand, given first the geopolitical situation of the country in a buffer zone between a German eastward drive and an emerging Russian led Pan-Slavism, plus the presence of increasingly secessionist ethnic minorities, the preservation of the dualist Monarchy was the optimal and perhaps the only way to maintain the territorial unity of the country and the power of the Hungarian historical ruling classes. This situation inevitably led to contradictions in party politics and to schizophrenic attitudes on the part of party politicians. The first major cleavage-related modification of partisan identities and of the party system took place in 1875. Taking advantage of an internal crisis in the Deák Party, Kálmán Tisza, leader of the moderate ‘centre-left’ 1848 opposition party, now established the Liberal Party. This reorganized party, supported by liberal nobility committed to economic modernization, took over the constitutional stance of the Deák Party with the party itself, and won - or, to be more exact, continued - control of the government. With the emergence of this first state party, a kind of one-party-system evolved in a period in which a number of unsettled issues remained on the political agenda: the power conflict bertween Austria and Hungary in a context of the decline and crisis of the Habsburg monarchy itself; the divisions among the nationalities within Hungary itself; the issue of church vs. state; and the intensifying divisions between labour and capital. The ruling party’s approach to all these problems was to insist that modernization was to be accomplished without civil society, that the dismantling of feudal structures was to be steered from above, namely by a group of the nobility possessing the privilege of engagement in public life; that, particularly in a society in which bourgeois attitudes and life-styles were most strongly represented by Jews and other ethnic minorities, there was a need to reaccentuate liberal values as patriotic. Furthermore, given the 1867 compromise (between a weakening absolutism and a partly liberal mobility), certain aspects of absolutism remained unchallenged, and there was a continuing strong attachment to an essentially feudal center (Gerő 1995). This last point implies serious consequences for democratic development including the ‘normalcy’ of representative multi-party Parliamentarism with the rotation of executive power. Thus we find the persistence of anti-liberal politics even in this period of ‘national liberalism’. Specifically, anti-liberal traits were manifest in: - the extremely limited selective system of suffrage. The proportion of voters in the population was between 5.6% and 6.8% (in the Austrian part of the monarchy 27% of the population had the right to vote) (Sources of these and all following data in this chapter: Rudai 1936; Földes and Hubai 1994; Bertényi and Gyapai 1992); - an open (non-secret) ballot; - the demarcation of electoral districts favouring the governing party; - the regularity and frequency of frauds and bribery; - the one-party-system regime of government. This antidemocratism was legitimized by the political philosophy of the historical ruling class, according to which Parliamentarianism, not popular representation, constituted the essence of national sovereignty. The practice of single party dominance continued: the ruling party (first the party of Deák up to 1875, then the Liberal Party of Kálmán Tisza, reorganized by his son István Tisza in 1910 under the name of the National Labour Party) was re-elected in twelve of the thirteen elections held between 1867 and 1914. The governing party was always strongly controlled by its leader(s) and always had a more than comfortable majority ranging somewhere between 60 and 80%. Furthermore, the majority maintained by the pro-compromise governing parties strongly contradicted the overwhelming nationalist mood of the Hungarian population. These parties appealed only to modernist, pro-bourgeois segments, to urban groups and - paradoxically - to non-Hungarians. Geographical location had a clear impact on voting attitudes, but the most decisive explanatory factor was nationality (or ethnicity) - which is why the ruling ‘national liberals’ created, whenever possible, districts in which ethnic Hungarians were in the minority. The opposition Independence Party - heavily divided into rival factions - normally won between 15 and 25% of the seats in Parliament. Political catholicism appeared in the 1890s with the birth of a conservative People’s Party which enjoyed 3-7% support. Earlier, a single-issue Anti-Semitic Party also appeared on the scene; its program demanding the deportation of Jews won it from 2 to 3% of the vote. From 1905 on, progressive and pro-Western bourgeous radical political thinking was represented only by the Democratic Party with a single MP, and by the leftist wing of the Independence Party. Six years after its formation in 1908, the Association (later renamed Party) of Smallholders, a pro-independence plebian farmers party, won four seats in Parliament. From the end of the 1880s a moderate national conservative formation, known first as the Moderate Oppositional Party, and then the United Oppositional Party, was also present with oscillating support, eventually dropping to 4 percent, at which point it joined the Liberal Party, and then, somewhat later, the Independent Party. The only genuine mass party, the Social Democratic party - a party which emerged from the Party of Non-voters established in 1878 and which was under the ideological influence of the Austrian Socialists - acquired ever more political influence, and played an ever more active social role. However, the struggle of the masses for political power remained rooted in a relatively strong trade union movement and was excluded from Parliament a political alliance based on the demand for universal suffrage was forged with the Independence Party in 1905. National and agrarian issues were not included in the social democratic agenda and thus the expression of radical agrarian socialism took place only in dissident movements outside the Parliamentary party system. Parties in the Counter-Revolutionary Period (1920-1944) The defeat of Austro-Hungary in World War I was followed first by the peaceful bourgeois democratic revolution symbolized by Count Mihály Károlyi, formerly the leader of the left-wing of the Independence Party and after 1913 leader of the party itself. The revolutionary government consisted of leftist pro-independence politicians, bourgeois radicals and social democrats. Unable to cope with external military pressure, the terms of the peace treaty, a catastrophic economic situation, escalating popular demands, an ever intensifying right wing counter-revolutionary movement, and tensions within the new political bodies, the government soon ceded power to the Socialist Party of Hungary, that is, to the Communists joined by the Social Democrats, now dominated by their own left wing. The Leninist-type Hungarian Council Republic formed by this alliance was crushed in mid-1919. Under foreign pressure the 1920 elections were the first to be organized on the principles of the secret ballot and universal suffrage. They were held in a traumatic emergency situation, in an occupied, shrunken and now ethnically rather homogenous country. This was a transitory period, and the election was openly negative in content: campaigning was focussed on attacking the Communists, the Social Democrats, and the cosmopolitan Liberals who were deemed responsible for the crushing defeat of the country and the nation. Positive campaigning was limited to the abstract, the cultural, and the ideological and consisted largely of calling for the creation of a Christian and national Hungary with the overarching priority of territorial revisionism. The Social Democrats chose to boycott the elections, permitting other kinds of political groupings to dominate the transition: Christian (mainly Catholic) and agrarian (smallholders) organizations, each gaining approximately equal shares of parliamentary seats. Following the one-party-system tradition a merger soon took place: a Christian Smallholders’ Agrarian and Bourgeois Party, referred to and abbreviated as the United Party, came into being. Political life and partisan identities were adjusted to the spiritual climate of the so-called Christian-national course tied to the personality of Admiral Miklós Horthy, Regent of Hungary. Core elements of this orientation were: - national sovereignty, integrity and revisionism - patriotic Christian thought with a historic mission to suppress revolutionary ideas, liberalism, bourgeois radicalism, Marxism and - last, but not least - Jewish penetration, - St Stephen’s Thought : Hungarian national and cultural supremacy in the region of the Carpathian Basin Count István Bethlen, the new head of the United Party and the prime minister as of 1921, was committed to a moderate version of the Christian-national course, to the restoration of historical Hungary under the leadership of the aristocracy, with a strong role for the traditional civil service, addressing the interests of large land-owners and big capital and to a lesser extent those of the nationalistic middle classes including smallholder components. In order to prevent destabilization by racist and populist radicalism, he limited the suffrage and reintroduced open ballots outside big cities. Thus transformed, the United Party gained 143 out of 245 seats in the 1922 elections. The left wing opposition, represented by the Social Democrats and by the Liberals won only 10 and 8 percent of the vote respectively; racists and genuine Christians on the far right made similar scores. Leading an authoritarian party in an authoritarian regime, Bethlen succeeded not only in political, but also in economic consolidation. Economic crisis reached Hungary in 1931 and led to a crisis of the United Party. Gyula Gömbös, formerly head of a small racist party and subsequently the leading figure of the rightists within the United Party, became the Prime Minister and announced that Hungary would adopt a corporatist National Working Schedule based on Mussolini's model. Deviating from Bethlen’s partly pro-British partly pro-Italian orientation, he brought Hungary ever closer to Nazi Germany. Following Gömbös’s death in 1936 the re-introduction of secret ballots speeded up tendencies of aggressive revisionism and racism resulting in antisemitic legislation and the partial re-annexation of Northern territories under Hitler’s patronage. The 1939 elections reflected this trend. The radicalized state party, now under the name Party of Hungarian Life, took a majority of 72% of the seats with 49% of the votes. Parties of openly fascist orientation, first of all the Arrow Cross Party, collected 30% of the votes but only 19% of the mandates. The major factor explaining this ultra rightist breakthrough was the ability to combine elements of social demagoguery with racist and nationalist propaganda. Many ruling party MPs sympathized with Arrow Cross ideas. The biggest losers of the left wing opposition were the formerly re-organized Independent Smallholders, who lost eleven of their twenty six seats. The Social Democrats dropped from 14 seats to 5. The Liberals - supported mainly by the Jewish bourgeoisie of Budapest - kept their five seats. The deepening involvement of the country in World War II in the hope of territorial gains split the governing party into pro-Nazi and anti-war factions. This development was reflected also in actual policies and led to German occupation in March 1944. Following a declaration of armistice in October by Regent Horthy - the Arrow Cross Party with German support took over the government. It outlawed opposition parties. However the Smallholders, the Social Democrats, the Communists and the small left-wing Peasant Party, cooperated in an anti-fascist Hungarian Front in an effort to organize resistance. The Transition to Communism (1945-1948) The above described constellation of resistance movements provided the basis of the post-war party structure from which the former governing state party and (pro)Fascist formations were excluded. The basic political divide in the period between 1945 and 1948 was between forces more or less accepting the geopolitical status quo of the country in the Soviet sphere of influence and those attempting to bring the country closer to the Western allied powers. The trauma of Fascism and of the holocaust plus the fact that the country was liberated - and occupied - by the Red Army brought about a situation in which originally and potentially pro-Western social groups, welcoming the liberation of the country, defined themselves as leftists supporting either the Communists or the Social Democrats. At this initial stage the leaders of these movements did not question the reality or the desirability of the Yalta arrangements, accepting Soviet influence although disagreeing, of course, regarding the exact measure of Hungarian autonomy and dependence. The smallholders emerged in this bipolar framework as the right wing catch-all-party of the majority of decidedly anti-Soviet and non-communist voters, attracting support on an ideological basis of patriotism, clericalism and traditionalism. They were, paradoxically, the party of the modern (non-communist i.e. free) capitalist West, of private property, of pluralism and at the same time the party of pre-modern values, identities and structures. In the municipal elections of Budapest in October 1945 the smallholders won an absolute majoirty of 50,5% against the United List of Workers (i.e. Communists and Social Democrats), which won 43% of the vote. This trend was repeated a month later in the national parliamentary elections, in which the smallholder vote rose to 57%. and the Communists took only 17% of the vote, and the Social Democrats 17.4%. The pro-Communist Peasants’ Party with a combination of anti-semitic-anti-German nationalism and populist democracy gained 6.9%, while the only authentic pro-Western party, the Bourgeois Democrats, won 1.6%. 3 The following years paved the way to Communist take-over. Relying on the presence of the Red Army, enjoying leading administrative positions, including the control of the police and the Army and having their own agents in the first ranks of the coalition parties, the Communists undermined and split all alternative forces. In the manipulated 1947 elections they emerged as the winning party with 22 percent. The role of the weakened and disorganized Smallholders’ Party was partly taken over by the Democratic People’s Party, a formation in the political tradition of Catholic parties emerging as a second force. The emergence of this Catholic formation was a consequence of the famous salami tactics (slicing up of rival parties into ever thinner parts) practiced by the Communists, a major object being the Smallholders, weakened and fragmented, softened up, put under pressure, assaulted. Thus the People’s Party came into being as an attempt to strengthen the anti-Communist opposition, and took nearly a fifth of the vote. Overall results (in seats) were: Communists 100, Smallholders (part of the CP lead alliance) 68, Social Democrats 67, Peasant’s Party 36, National Christian Alliance 4, Democratic People’s Party 60, Independence Party (right wing national) 49, Radical Party 6, Independent Hungarian Democratic Party (agrarian, clerical) 18, Bourgeois Democratic Party 3. Altogether: 271 for the coalition (including Smallholders) and 140 for the opposition. In spite of massive frauds, restrictions and an increasingly oppressive climate, the Smallholders (although part of the enforced coalition, but regarded as an anti-communist force), the People’s Party and the other minor anti-communist opposition parties - together won 55% of the vote.3 Reflecting the change in Soviet politics and the start of the cold war, the salami tactics of the Hungarian CP aimed at the gradual weakening, splitting and exclusion of all rival parties was now replaced by the violent liquidation of the multi-party system. The first target was the fraternal Social Democratic Party in June 1948, when the forced fusion of the two parties was accompanied by the expulsion of so-called right wingers. The Party of Hungarian Workers was created. With the Communist take-over, other parties were not banned formally, they simply withered away, and for a while one could find them even in the telephone book. Within a year the Stalinist one-party dictatorship was fully established. The Dualism of Market Socialism As has been shown on the preceding pages, the defeat of the Hungarian fight for national independence from Austria in 1849 was followed first by terror and then from the middle of the sixties by a compromise resulting in the dualist structures of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy with limited sovereignty, a measure of political pluralism and the introduction of capitalist modernization. Something similar happened after the anti-communist national revolution of 1956. Terror and retaliation were followed by concessions. From the mid-sixties on, a compromise emerged resulting in a special type of dualism. The main characteristics of this Kádárian compromise (J. Kádár was the leader of the Communist Party under the name of Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party) were: - a bargain with the great majority of the population in which the party leadership offered (1) a kind of consumer socialism with modestly improving living standards; (2) a socialist welfare state with social security and full employment; (3) a certain measure of informal administrative pluralism; (4) a restricted and manipulated cultural autonomy; (5) non-interference in private lives; (6) a limited degree of personal freedom, first of all in granting permissions to travel. The price demanded and - generally - received was simple: non-interference in politics, respect for and at least a degree of lip-service to the rules of the game. - the introduction of economic reforms without changing the political structures of the one party system: market socialism - shifts in the composition of economic and political elites: a diminishing weight and role for ideological leadership; the emergence of an ever stronger and more influential pragmatic and technocratic managerial elite in the economy, in public administration, and within the party itself (Szalai 1997). Under these conditions, the political attitudes and - later - voting patterns of the population remained determined by paternalism and by consumerist and welfare statist expectations, and the scope for mass scale political mobilization remained narrow. At the same time, however, the relative autonomy and continuity of cultural life contributed to the early preparation and the later actual emergence of a bipolar party system built around the carriers of two distinct and conflicting cultural traditions: the populists and the urbanizers (later to become the core components of the initial hegemonic parties of post 1989 cultural politics, the Hungarian Democratic Forum and the Alliance of Free Democrats). A limited administrative pluralism, cultural diversity were matched by economic dualism. One sector of the economy of the 1970s and 1980s was rooted in (post)totalitarian bureaucratic central planning, while the other was tied to the emerging market economy. Statist political redistribution was complemented by market-based distribution. (Bernhard 1996) The emerging dualism was reflected as well in the differences between the values, life-styles and attitudes deeply rooted in Kádárism and those shaped by the gradual shift to capitalism.4 This dualism has remained a strong cleavage-creating division in post - 1989 politics; it explains the strength of the post-communist Socialist Party rooted in both sectors of society. The Revived Relevance of the Populist - Urbanizer - Debate The basic cleavage between identity-based traditionalism and Westernization, a product of the contradictions in Hungarian state formation and nation building under the pressure of exogenous modernization in a semi-peripheral buffer zone, determined party structures and party competition between the 1860s and the 1940s as well as the absence of mass democracy and the weakness of civil society. The special type of single party system, the geopolitical context with its fatal threats for the country, and the continuing accumulation of territorial, cultural and functional cleavages did not, however, allow for a clear expression and translation of this fundamental divide in the party system. In the initial stage of party formation on the threshold of regime transformation around 1989 oppositional forces defined their distinctive identities by reaching back to the tradition of a confrontation which was primarily cultural but carried and expressed the basic historical cleavage most clearly. They revived the debate of populists versus urbanizers which had surfaced in the 1920s and 1930s when both sides were in opposition to the official ideology and policies of the national-Christian course standing for the continuity of so-called gentlemanly Hungary, i.e., for the continuing supremacy of the upper classes in social and political life. On the populists’ side in this debate, carried on among poets, writers and sociologists, three basic ideas had emerged: - plebian (i.e. peasant) radicalism - agrarian reform, meaning the elevation of the peasantry into the body of the nation - i.e., making the peasant the core of the national community - a collectivist third road for Hungary (implying for some a federation of East European peoples) (Lackó 1992) Given the fact of a dualist structure with a traditionalist feudal sector and a pro-Western modern bourgeois sector with a high share of Jews in dominant positions, the populists had represented the peasantry as an underlcass outside both sectors and had insisted on the utmost priority of the survival of Hungarianhood, which they saw as jeopardized by a modernization dominated by ethnically and culturally foreign elements. On the other hand, the urbanizers, Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals, had defended the applicability of the universalist Western type social model, and were supported by radicals, bourgeois democrats and social democrats. In the early 1930s Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös, with his pro-Nazi and pro-racist inclinations, tried to ally with the populists. Later, Communist politicians similarly, but with more success, flirted with populist thinking. The human rights centered Democratic Opposition from the late 1970s on may be regarded as the reincarnation of the Western universalist urbanist tradition (even though the core of this current of dissident intellectuals arose from among the school of Georg Lukács). This is the historical background of the Alliance of Free Democrats, which was to become the hegemonic party of the Westernization block in the post-1989 party landscape. The leading post-1989 party of the traditionalist side and of the national-Christian government coalition (1990-1994) was to be the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF), a party founded in 1987 from the milieu of the populist writers and intellectuals. Its evolution was, however, strongly influenced by party leader and prime minister József Antall who tried to combine the West European ideal of a German style Christian Democracy with the moderate Hungarian national-Christian course tradition of István Bethlen of the twenties. The inherent tension between radical populism and national modernization not only helps us to understand the decline of the Hungarian Democratic Forum from 1993 on; it also helps to explain the later division of the national parties. into forces of identity-based endogenous modernization and of anti-democratic and and anti-modern 'social nationalism'. REFERENCES Here Lipset describes cultural politics as the relative dominance of cultural or value factors and the superimposition of these factors on ohters. (Lipset 1969: 93). Idea put forward by P. Bakka (Bergen University). Comparing the 57% of the Smallholders in 1945 and the results of the national traditionalist parties in the 1990 parliamentary elections, i.e. 54% of territorial lists and 59% of the seats, MDF leader J. Antall interpreted this as a remarkable constancy of traditionalist vote potential over a period of 43 years. This type of situation prevails in a number of other post-Communist countries and creates a social and political cleavage which we call the post-socialist or post-communist cleavage. One side of this cleavage is usually represented by post-(reform)-communist parties preserving old ‘Socialist’ values and attitudes while defending the vested interests of the old-new ruling elite of emerging capitalism. This explains the divisions, the identity crisis of the Hungarian Socialists, but also the strength of this party: its embeddedness in both sectors of the present dual society. CHAPTER THREE FROZEN Cleavages and CHANGING parties in post-communist Hungary from 1989 TO MID-1997 1989 was a year of critical juncture in the history of East Central and Eastern Europe, and Hungary was no exception. As Seymour Martin Lipset has pointed out, none of the new nations had effective civil societies in place, and it was difficult to institutionalize pluralist policies. The need to form parties arrived suddenly and without preparation. Party formation in Hungary began from the existence of small illegal or semi-legal dissident networks on the one side and the former state party (divided into a reformist and an orthodox wing) on the other. Reformers - renaming their party Hungarian Socialist Party in late 1989 - were in key positions, actively preparing the transition to democracy and the market economy; genuine Communists - carrying on under the old name Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, by now just Workers’ Party - lacked not only support, but the will and the means to control the transition. The weakness of the Communists meant that the regime issue soon lost its primacy; the central cleavage became the value-based division between the oppositional forces. In the formative period of the new parties, the nationalists sought a compromise with some of the reform communists, while liberal parties sought a radical change of elites; although in 1994 the ex-dissident liberal Free Democrats formed a coalition government with the Socialists facing a national and anti-communist opposition. The new ascendancy of the cleavage between two elite groups within what had been the opposition permitted the reemergence of a central and historically rooted cleavage, the cleavage between Traditionalists and Westernizers. The two dominant parties from the intellectual milieu, the Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ) and the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) were direct descendants of these two parallel and competing currents as they had manifested themselves in the opposition of the past ten to fifteen years. The MDF originated in a movement of national populist writers, historians and social scientists, held together by their anxiety about the destiny problems of nationhood - by which they meant the consequences of the Versailles/Trianon peace treaty, the Hungarians in the diaspora, demographic decrease, cultural and ethnic vulnerability, so-callednational diseases such as suicide, mental stress and the loss of moral values and of solidarity. The original political orientation was a kind of plebian, quasi-leftist, national third road concept, an orientation somewhere between Eastern communism and Western capitalism. In the first year of its formation in 1987 this movement was joined by many members and descendants of the former Christian traditionalist middle classes. Following party leader József Antall (later prime minister), traditionalist and Christian conservatism emerged as the dominant force in party politics, although in bitter rivalry with radical populism. On the other side, the SZDSZ was the direct continuation of the Democratic Opposition of the 1980's, with the ethos of moral resistance against the regime (in contrast to the semi-peaceful symbiosis of populist writers with nationally-oriented Communist party leaders). The milieu of the hard core of the SZDSZ typically consisted of Budapest intellectuals who had started their ideological careers as committed Marxists. Some of them had been followers of Georg Lukács, making their long march to become human rights activists, revisionists and, finally, radical liberals. Many of them came from nomenklatura families; many were of Jewish origin. Parties like the SZDSZ and the MDF, led by intellectuals and drawing from subcultural elites, quickly became dominant in the new regime, and parties based on parties from the past, such as the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats, and the Smallholders, were forced to adjust. The reformist wing of the former state party, now the MSZP (The Hungarian Socialist Party), also acquired the traits of what we may call the milieu party type. These parties each drew from specific cultural milieux. Their members shared analogous life experiences and socialization patterns, had similar socio-cultural backgrounds and similar aesthetic tastes. Although they often shared vague overarching value orientations, the specific political priorities and programmatic ideas of members could and often did vary. This aesthetisation of politics, looked upon as a typical post-modern development in the West, has been present from the very beginning of multipartism in post-communist Hungary. As a result, contradictory processes emerged as the parties, party alignments, and the party system took shape. On the macro-political level, the trend of crystallization and selection mainly along the cultural cleavage of Westernization versus traditionalism was accomplished in a short time span. Of the 160 or more proto-parties registered, only six were able to overcome the threshold of 4% in 1990 and of 5% in 1994 (the same six in both elections: the ex-reform-communist Socialists; the Hungarian Democratic Forum, the Smallholders, the Christian Democrats on the national side, the Alliance of Free Democrats on the Westernization side and the Alliance of Young Democrats originally on the Westernization side, but by now on the opposite side of the major cleavage. However, inside the parties severe conflicts were evident from the beginning between those whom we may call movementists, eager to preserve the loose coalition character of the organization, and partitocrats, those favoring a more bureaucratic and professional party organization, as well as between groups and personalities linked to divergent political and ideological currents. As a result, party leaders, as is typical in pre-mass parties, seek to hold themselves above party.(Sartori 1968) In contrast to the heterogeneity of the individual parties and the prevailing pragmatic, materialistic and consensus-oriented citizenry, the new party system thus emerged as the confrontation of two value-based camps. The MDF won the 1990 election on the basis of its presentation of itself as the Quiet Force, promising stability and a non-radical approach to the issue of regime transformation, and became the hegemonic party of the traditionalist camp (comprising also the Christian Democrats and the Smallholders, although the latter, becoming a radical and populist protest party, soon left the coalition). The Free Democrats - together with the Young Democrats - were the key parties of the radical, liberal, anti-traditional Westernizing camp, which also included the mainstream of post-reform-communist Socialists. The two political camps manifested the age-old division between those for whom the supreme value was the maintenance of national identity and the survival of Hungarian nationhood and those who put making a radical socio-cultural adjustment to the West and the pursuit of catch-up modernization the central goal of political life: in short, Hungarianhood versus civil society. On a continuum of values, the traditionalist parties focused on organic solidarity, ethnocentric collectivism, cultural distinctiveness, homogenizing state authority, clericalism and looking inward; the Westernizers believed in individualism, multicultural diversity, rewarding performance, autonomy, the free market, secularism and looking outward. Although all the neo-traditionalist parties demonstrated an emotional preoccupation with the trauma of Trianon, they mainly treated the issue more as an issue of symbolic politics than as an issue requiring revisionist action. Representative of this was the comment by Prime Minister Antall in June 1990, I am a prime minister of fifteen million Hungarians - in soul and in emotions. (Hungary proper has a population of ten million.) The stance of the Westernizing parties was that of Realpolitik: accept the administrative status quo, treat the question of Hungarian minorities abroad as a human rights problem. The issue was aggravated by nationalistic policies in neighboring Rumania, Slovakia and Serbia. As in the past, the Hungarian nationalist elite could be interpreted as threatened by others, or as threatening to others; this historical dilemma became a component of post-communist cultural politics. Parties, however, are not just prisoners of existent cleavages. They play an independent role in cleavage translation, in policy making, in structuring the political space, and in shaping each other. While in many consociational democracies of Western Europe political elites have been successful in overcoming divisive heterogeneity, the opposite has been the case in Hungary, where political elites have tended to superimpose their own subcultural divisiveness, based on latent or past cleavages, on a much less divided electorate. In the period between 1990 and 1994, during the rule of the national-Christian Lager (the German term for camp denoting a partisan bloc in the context of pillarizing cultural politics), the intensification of these cleavages, by the elites, led inevitably to the neglect or at least the inadequate treatment of economic issues. Prime Minister Antall,.on the one hand, conscious of an historic mission, regarded himself, his party and the national-Christian ideological community as forces destined to restore the organic identity and continuity of the Hungarian nation, linking back to the eleventh century and the state formation and nation-building efforts of Saint Stephen, the first king of the country who converted his people to Western Christianity, established a strong centralized state and made Hungary a part of Europe. He pleaded for a spiritual community of the nation as a whole. On the other hand, he also viewed his historic mission as requiring that he do his best to foster Europeanization, the capitalist social market economy, the rule of law, and the integration of Hungary into the EU and NATO. This dualism contained not only the contradiction between a history-rooted veneration of nationhood and the supranational or in some aspects post-national construction of Europe, but also the incompatibility between the ideals of a spiritually united Christian national community and a Western-type pluralist and multi-cultural democracy and its concomitant readiness to accept different ideologies as legitimate. Post-communist Kulturkampf The first years of post-communist Hungarian pluralism were thus characterized by a political discourse, both within and outside of Parliament, overloaded with symbolic issues and questions of national identity and historical continuity. The central theme became, who is a genuine Hungarian? The elites of the governing party were convinced they had not just won a simple electoral victory but had been legitimized as a metaphysical entity, as representing the fundamental nature of the nation. Opposing forces, whether political, journalistic, or academic, were consequently regarded as threatening the survival of the nation. Using the German term Kulturkampf (cultural struggle), originally coined to describe the conflict between state and church for the control of education in Western Europe around the turn of the century, we can point to three central areas of party and public policy competition in Hungary during this period. The governing elite was dedicated to the idea to revive and to put into leading social positions a traditional Christian-national middle class resulting in a measure of clientelist policies in the economy and the administration. The control of the educational system The identification of national curricula, the role and place of religious education, the restitution of schools and universities as Church property, and the question of secular education were classical Kulturkampf conflicts both on the central level and on the level of local communities. The control of the media The existence of independent and often critical public and private media was interpreted as the effort of media intellectuals to damage the cause of the nation by both the moderate conservatives and the radically nationalist currents of the governing parties fighting for the occupation of the media and seeking to purge public television and radio of undesirable.components. The radical nationalists gaining - at least, temporarily - leading positions in public television and broadcasting went so far as to interpret the struggle as one of Cosmopolitan liberal-bolshevik intellectuals versus a genuine Hungarian and Christian media, thereby adding a distinctly antisemitic edge to the debate. The efforts to control education and the media as means of indoctrination produced a number of problems. The principles of the rule of law and of checks-and-balances via the counteracting forces of pluralist institutions were put at risk. Instead, an effort was being made to impose a kind of social pillarization on the Hungarian citizenry, a pillarization which could be found among the cultural elites, but not within the de-ideologized public. Initiatives were undertaken - with relatively little success - to establish parallel, culturally distinctive civil society networks, including professional organizations, especially (but not exclusively) on the side of the traditionalists. One has to work constantly to change the soul, the mentality of a people, Antall declared. (According to his confessor, the Prime Minister's final words on his deathbed in December, 1993, were I wanted a Christian Hungary, only this has a future. His success may be measured by noting that only one-sixth of all Hungarians claim to live according to the teachings of the churches.) The control of foreign policy Foreign policy was an area in which the conflict between traditionalist and westernizing tendencies were also marked. Although the ruling elite was strongly dedicated to leading Hungary into the communities of Western European integration and NATO, they constantly indulged in rhetorics of national sovereignty, drawing on a nineteenth century style of nation-state romanticism and displaying a passionate preoccupation with ethnic solidarity. Two events of the year 1993 could illustrate this almost schyzophrenic ambivalence. In May, the Basic Treaty between Hungary and Ukraine was to be ratified by Parliament. The treaty prepared and negotiated by the government was a piece of Realpolitik and the compromise contained in it soon became a kind of prototype being a precondition of the Euro-Atlantic integration of Hungary. While the Hungarian side acknowledged the existing post-Versailles state boundaries, the other side accepted the responsibility for granting minority rights to ethnic Hungarians. In September, however, a quasi official reburial of Admiral Horthy took place, of the pre-war Governor (Regent) of Hungary, the embodiment of revisionist policies responsible for leading Hungary to Hitler’s side in the hope of restoring Great Hungary. But the ratification of the Basic Treaty with Ukraine itself was a contradictory process and led to a split between radicals and moderates in the traditionalist camp, not only on the intra-party level (Democratic Forum versus Smallholders), but also within the ruling party, resulting in a split of radical rightist groups from the MDF and in the establishment of the racist Hungarian Truth and Life Party by István Csurka, former MDF-vice president. In this context, it was no surprise that the Parliamentary ratification of the treaty could succeed only with the votes of the modernist opposition parties. (After the change of government following the 1994 elections, the new governing parties extended the basic treaties to Slovakia and Romania, under fierce attack from the national opposition.) Ambiguities in cleavage translation In other areas of policy the conflict between the traditionalist ideological bias and the determination to accept the requirements of capitalist transformation was more subtly but nevertheless strongly at work, producing profound ambiguities. Three examples illustrate this : First, the process of de-etatization collided with centralizing, statist tendencies in public administration and with political interventionism in economic and cultural domains. The tendency of the MDF (and later the MSZP) to seek to establish itself as a state party was, of course, in direct contradiction to the commitment to decentralization. Second, any hopes for a free and spontaneous development of the privatization process were seriously dampened by statist efforts to recreate a national-Christian middle class. Political patronage, including partial restitution and massive compensation to selected groups, in spite of the influx of foreign capital, had unforeseen and often destructive effects, both socially and economically. The anti-collectivist bias in agriculture resulted in the creation of a massive small peasantry lacking the means for efficient farming. The formerly successful sector, a combination of cooperative and household farming, became an area in permanent crisis. Third, the practice of redistribution and growth-induction, disregarding equilibrium, also made it impossible to set a clear cut public economic policy in pursuit of radical structural reforms and deregulation all agreed were necessary. Ministers of finance came and went, but there was a constant confrontation between a monetarist approach and a growth orientation within the government. Overall, the political record of the MDF government is complex. Certainly real progress was made in decisively important areas: the maintenance and consolidation of the general framework of the rule of law and of the institutions of multi-party parliamentary democracy, the steady progress toward a capitalist market economy, and the steps taken toward integration into West European and North Atlantic supranational organizations. Regime change became irreversible, no mean accomplishment. On the other hand, with respect to socio-economic public policies the performance of this government can best be described as muddling through. The economy did gain in relative autonomy despite attempts at political control. The most serious deficit was in establishing effective political linkage between citizens and government - what we may call the failure of cleavage translation. The language and style of communication resulting from elite consciousness of having an historic mission were alien to the ordinary citizen. The vast majority of the population had been effectively socialized in the years of János Kádár's goulash communism. They were strongly materialist, committed to the welfare state, and deideologized. These attitudes and values, preferences did not change overnight. Ideological distances and fragmentation characterized the parties and their elites, producing a kind of polarized multipartism in Sartoris terms: a political system characterized by centrifugal drives, irresponsible opposition and unfair competition [which] is hardly a viable system. . But these differences were not reflected in the general public. The parties did not simply translate existing cleavages; they imposed their own. There was not simply a lack of -correspondence, but a deep gap between a party system based on cultural politics and an electorate hostile to ideological penetration, i.e., to the centrality of ideology. The evidence is clear: priorities of Kulturkampf policies were rejected (places 14, 16, 18), while a pragmatic, materialist and welfare statist attitude (1 to 5) prevailed (see Table below). THE POST-SOCIALIST CLEAVAGE family and the anti-kulturkampf vote There were several stages on the way to the crushing defeat of the MDF and the national-conservative parties in the 1994 elections. After the first year of confusion (expressed in the widely supported taxi-drivers’ strike and the reversal of votes in the 1990 municipal elections), there was a period of public apathy regarding the parties. Then the FIDESZ, the generation-based, at that time radical and pragmatic Alliance of Young Democrats, an anti-party party, attracted popular support, and subsequently the public turned to the Socialists (in what might be called an evolution from exit to voice). The sweeping victory of the ex-Communist Socialists in 1994, plus popular support for the coalition they made with the ex-dissident Free Democrats (the second strongest party in the vote) demonstrated popular support for a mix of continuity and change. (In effect, this was what the electorate had sought in 1990, when it accepted the MDF's claim that it would be the Quiet Force, achieving change peacefully and carefully.) Table The assessment of the importance of political objectives (on a continuum from 1 to 5) Average 1. Competent people should manage the economic affairs of the country 4,77 2. To improve the standards of health care and education 4,75 3. To ease the burdens on the population resulting from economic transformation 4,69 4. To decrease unemployment 4,62 5. To increase pensions and social benefits 4,62 6. To protect human rights and individual freedom 4,60 7. To struggle against crime with a police having efficient means and authority 4,59 8. To decrease unjust inequalities between people 4,49 9. To stop the fall of morality 4,46 10. To protect the environment more efficiently 4,35 11. Efficient representation of Hungarian interests abroad 4,22 12. To grant the right for abortion to women 4,19 13. To promote private enterprise and free markets 3,97 14. To strengthen national feeling 3,71 15. To speed up privatization of state companies 3,22 16. To remove ex-CP members from leading functions 3,19 17. To grant further functioning for non profitable enterprises and mines 2,82 18. To increase the influence of religion and the churches 2,73 Source: Kurtán et al., ed. 1993. Median, in Magyarország Politikai Évkönyve (Political Yearbook of Hungary), p. 650. The 1994 vote contained a two-fold message: a refusal of ideologically determined policy-making (by this time the Socialists were seen as professional and pragmatic, not rooting their platform in the cultural cleavage) and support for Westernization. The voters were not interested in making the time-trip back into the twenties and thirties; a shorter trip into the late eighties had greater appeal. The well-known faces and familiar style of the ex-Communists offered a sense of stability and security, after the ideological turmoil of the first post-1989 government and its policies. Returning them to power gave the voters a sense of restoration of continuity and security, a conviction they need not live in shame for having long accepted Kádárian goulash communism - their own biographies were relegitimized. The sweeping victory of the Socialists in 1994 revealed the existence of a set of deeply rooted post-socialist cleavages in the society and the economy. The post-socialist cleavage family Kádárian Communism versus emerging capitalism can also be described in the terms of a dual society (or social dualism) split into a sector rooted in state socialism and a sector of capitalism in-the-making. Beginning form the middle of the sixties a special type of authoritarian regime emerged, based on the Kádárian bargain: one-party-rule and external dependence were to be accepted by the population in exchange for increasing living standards, social security, economic reforms, limited cultural and administrative pluralism and tolerance of privacy. A technocratic elite became increasingly dominant in politics and in the economy. Concomitantly a process of petty-embourgeoisment of significant strata emerged tied to a market-oriented second economy. In preparing the political and economic regime change, the political arm of this technocracy played a leading role in the shape of the reformist wing of the state party and later of the ex-communist Socialist Party. Following the 1990 elections, this late Kádárian technocracy could not only keep but also decisively strengthen its dominant position in the economy; in the political field, however, it was more or less marginalized. The sweeping victory of the Socialists in 1994 expressed the response of broad segments of the electorate irritated by the decrease of living standards accompanied by a Kulturkampf neglecting socio-economic issues. The demands for social security, for welfare and consumption were channeled into a Kádárian nostalgia and into votes for the familiar faces and styles offered by the ex-Communist party dressed in social democratic colours. The Kulturkampf antecedents forged the alliance of Socialists and the Free Democrats originally representing the opposite sides of the post-communist Kádárian cleavage. This resulted in permanent coalition tensions, but also in more and more adjustment and assimilation of the Free Democrats with the price of questioning their identity. The late Kádárian technocracy as a kind of a new ruling class of managerial capitalism (I. Szelényi) has a double face. Partially, it is an antithesis of bourgeois political democracy favouring informal decision-making and non-public bargains, and the spread of political patronage, but equally committed to capitalist marketization and to radical economic Westernization. It plays a steering role in socio-economic transformation continuing the historical path of semi-exogenous modernization. Although the leadership of the MDF with the removal of vice-president Csurka did break away from populist volkisch type radicalim in 1993, the change came too late and too incompletely to save the party. The fear of radical decommunization and of increasing fascistoid and antisemitic tendencies mobilized segments of the electorate to a protest vote and contributed to a rapprochement of the MSZP and the SZDSZ on the levels both of the party elites and of their supporters. Beginning with the Democratic Charta movement against radical rightism and resulting in a coalition government of Socialists and Free Democrats, these developments started to push FIDESZ, unwilling to ally with the Socialists, over to the nationalist-conservative side of the dominant cultural cleavage. The first years of regime change after 1989 had frustrated the majority of the population. Neither the introduction of pluralist democracy nor the transition to a capitalist economy had made everyday life easier or more secure. On the contrary, the price for freedom appeared to be insecurity, a decline in material well-being, and the rise of inequalities. The public was irritated by the focus of the government, parliament and the parties on Kulturkampf rather than socio-economic issues .Many believed that if the ideological and cultural issues could be set aside, everyday life would automatically be improved. Shock therapy as cleavage-creating policy The reaction of the socialist-liberal government established in1994 to the over-politicization of the previous regime and its efforts to revitalize a fictitious national-Christian middle class was to adopt a conscious strategy of de- politicization, especially of the public media, as well as a technocratic problem-solving approach to public policy. The commitment to rational technocratic calculation and engineering assumed the qualities of an ideology and was also designed to be an effective way to legitimize the increasing power of the post-communist managerial elite. Technocratic crisis management became particularly important in March, 1995, after 9 months of stalemate owing to intra-coalition conflict as well to conflicts within the senior coalition partner. the policy package of Lajos Bokros, minister of finance, was adopted, and became the very essence of government policy. The most important components in this stabilization program were the stimulation of exports by currency devaluation and import duties; streamlining social and health services; giving up universal allowances; introducing residual means-tested social transfers; limiting collective and personal consumption; imposing wage restraint, reducing spending and employment in public education, in public health, and in scientific research and cutting back the public sector across the board. Thus, a general monetary restriction was pursued with the aim of restoring financial equilibrium as the precondition of growth. Was this shock therapy related to the question of political cleavages? The answer is complex and multidimensional: First, the Bokros package as a public policy issue of rational choice had nothing to do with any structural cleavage. It was, rather a consequence of exigencies without viable alternative, a Sachzwang. Hungary's cumulated public debt and the continuing disequilibrium resulting from the economic policies of the Communist past (and, to some extent, of the previous government) left the new government no alternative. Second, the package represented a basic act of economic regime transformation, and as such could be related to the set of post-socialist cleavages. As I. Szekeres, leader of the Socialist parliamentary group, said, the end of the Kádárian regime can be dated March 12, 1995. Third, the package followed the logic and the necessity of commodification, the extension of market and commodity relations, as the basic principle of a capitalist market economy. As Bokros himself pointed out, the purpose was to prevent having secondary income redistribution by the state distort the primary income redistribution by the market. Here we see a basic political division in capitalist systems, the classical social democratic cleavage which originated in the conflict between labour and capital. It is the conflict between forces interested in policies of decommodification, the weakening and the limitation of the logic of the market and of commodity production i.e., in a political redistribution against the market, and forces interested in the undisturbed functioning of the market, and the extension of the market logic to society as a whole. On another level, this can be seen as the conflict between mass democracy with its objectives of inclusion, popular participation and equality and the class based inequalities of pure capitalism in which the functioning of market allocation is allowed to lead to exclusion. The Bokros package adopted an openly Hayekian philosophy, rejecting social citizenship as morally unjust. Fourth and finally, the Bokros package can be seen in international terms as stemming from a typical center versus periphery cleavage. The economic and political penetration by supranational decision-making centers is manifest in the intervention they made to ensure that their priorities of economic and social policy-making were respected in Hungary. IMF demands and the impact of the Maastricht convergence criteria were of decisive importance for the government in its resolution to adopt the package even at the possible cost of jeopardizing its legitimacy and its chances of reelection. Furthermore, foreign interference tended to produce a relevant domestic political cleavage: acceptance of dependency (what is good for the IMF is good for Hungary) versus a quasi anti-colonialist defense of the national interest. This cleavage was apparent in the division between the government and the opposition, but also within the individual parties, and, increasingly, within the general population. In sum, the introduction of the Bokros stabilization package shifted the fundamental cleavage in Hungarian politics toward a socio-economic commodification cleavage. The formal centrality of the cultural divide combined with an ideological and political anti-post-communist cleaveage in party politics remained, however, persistent. Class struggle became dressed up as anti-communist and national Kulturkampf. The effects of the commodification cleavage on the party system The shift in cleavages, as defined by party elites, had a strong and sometimes surprising effect on intra-party and inter-party cleavages, particularly among the out of power traditionalists. In response to the Bokros program, the opposition adopted a quasi social-democratic, even Keynesian and welfare-protectionist line of attack on the government. Ferenc Kulin, a moderate conservative, originally a leading politician of the MDF sought to justify this change of policy profile by admitting, first, that the central ideas of patriotic traditionalist parties and the actual political attitudes of the electorate could not be reconciled: The national awareness of present Hungarian society is not in a state in which it could be mobilized. On the other hand, he has argued, fighting against the policies of adjustment to a world market dominated by multinational companies (...) and globalized media powers can be a practical way of working against anti-national policies. He even achieves a nationalistic variant of the decommodification argument prevailing in Western center-left parties: (...) economic policy which does not measure the far-reaching social effects of each of its steps is anti-national. The only party which was unambiguously and whole-heartedly in favor of commodification and therefore of the stabilization package was SZDSZ, the Alliance of Free Democrats. Although the program was harmful to the interests of the SZDSZ middle-class clientele employed in or dependent upon the public sector, it seemed to be compatible with the liberal ethos and with the original radicalism of the party elite on the question of regime change. The more radical segments of the nationalist opposition were quick to seize upon this stance as a further sign that the SZDSZ is the arch enemy, cosmopolitan, and non-Hungarian, thereby occasionally seeking to split the coalition. Similar arguments were sometimes made within the MSZP as well. The identity crisis of the Socialists The Socialist Party became the key actor in Hungarian politics, but at a cost of serious problems of identity, strategy and maintaining electoral support. The landslide electoral victory of this formerly ghettoised successor party - taking 33% of party list votes in the first round and winning almost all constituencies in the second - the Party became the first popular catch-all party in Hungarian political history. It proved to be the best organized party in the country with a strong active membership and a reservoir of professional leaders on several - national and local - levels. Overcoming its quarantine-like isolation of 1990-1991, during which time it was predominantly an urban intellectual party, it succeeded first in attracting blue-collar workers in industrial centers and then moving out to capture support from the whole spectrum of Hungarian social stratification and value orientations. The party has especially strong support in the older age groups. However, in spite (or perhaps due to) its broad character as a catch-all party, the MSZP brought instability to itself and to the party system. Being the gravitational center of politics it provided coalition linkage. , it collected the votes of blue-collar workers and pensioners and of managers, administrators, and the cultural elite; it appealed to winners and to losers, to the urban and to the rural population, to the traditional trade unions and to international and domestic monetary institutions. But it was unable to offer a single consistent identification. The mainstream of the MSZP found its place on the pro-Western side of the basic cultural cleavage of Hungarian politics, although the party is not rooted in that divide. It has a troubled identity: as the successor party it attracts the votes and sympathies of former members of the Communist Party; as a party committed to the basic values and principles of Western social democracy plus as the party of late-Kádárian goulash communism, it attracts the support of the losers and the adherents of the welfare state. Strong and large groups of the economic elite are behind the Socialists. The MSZP had the strong organization and technocratic leadership style of the state party of the pre-1989 period. It was and it is a catch-all party along several dimensions, .eg., according to sociological criteria (region, profession, milieu), according to pressure group memberships, according to personal ties and networks, and according to ideological rivalries (trade unionist, libertarian, social liberal, classical social democratic, nationalist, Marxist and bureaucratic-technocratic). Not surprisingly, following the 1994 electoral victory and formation of the government, tensions within the party increased. Not all the (often conflicting) electoral expectations could possibly be met, economic and financial constraints limited policy alternatives, and the strategic and ideological options of inner-party groupings and personalities became ever more divergent. In the first nine months of government the inner-party tensions focusing on economic policy and on the relationship between the coalition partners made decision-making on crucial policy issues all but impossible .Some time following the adoption of the Bokros stabilization package, the debate within the party lead to a delicate but fragile balance. This was expressed by Ferenc Kósa (who belongs to the nationalist-minded anti-capitalists), my sense of justice gives me no peace; a victorious party cannot puts its values into a deep freeze. Patronage and dealignment From late 1996 on, the relative stability of the Hungarian party system became increasingly questioned by the electorate and by sharpening centrifugal movements in the individual parties. This destabilization was due to the policy record of the government under Prime Minister Gyula Horn and the corresponding changes in public opinion. The government strategy for financial consolidation has been successful, the equilibrium of the economy has substantially improved, public spending has decreased. The confidence of international financial institutions and of foreign capital appears to have been restored. The social costs of these improvements were, however, considered by some to be too high. Real personal income declined by 15 to 16 percent in the first two years of the new government, income inequalities were growing, the middle strata were losing buying power, and the welfare system, particularly in the domain of health care, showed alarming signs of financial collapse. By fall 1997 there were some very modest signs of a relative improvement in general living standards, without the trend of growing inequalities changing. General discontent, manifested by a score of 75% pessimistic in the 1996 Eurobarometer survey, was aggravated by the issue of corruption. A political patronage scandal involving an individual brokerage fee of 8 million DM paid by the State Privatization Agency was seen by many as the mere tip of an iceberg, and the issue was exploited by the opposition parties, first of all by FIDESZ, and important in shaping popular political attitudes. Former SZDSZ leader János Kis has written, The authority of democratic institutions has touched bottom; in the whole of East Central Europe, it is the weakest in this nation. He believes the late-Kádárian bargain has failed and blames the coalition partner. Ex-functionaries promised to maintain basic social security benefits in order to secure leading positions in which they practice clientelism and corruption to an extent that makes a mockery of their promise. Corruption, the parasitical penetration of a weak state by interest groups, and the interconnections between the public service and big capital are linked to the poor performance of the state and the decay of public services. The self-defense of the coalition parties (the Free Democrats having been shown to be involved in the scandal as well as the Socialists) was to remind the opposition parties they did no better. Surveys indicated that public opinion reacted not only by withdrawing support from the government, but also by questioning the legitimacy of democratic institutions, particularly parliament and the parties. Mass protest against this pornography of politics threatened to override and/or distort the significance of social and cultural cleavages as it has in a number of other pluralist nations (Italy, Belgium, Austria, Spain, Iceland and Japan among others). This challenge of legitimacy strongly affected the parties. Within the MSZP the ability of party leader Gy Horn to use his personal blend of autocratic leadership and tactical mediation to contain intraparty groups and discourage actual or potential rivals had not however been weakened and his authority prevailed. Growing international prestige, healthy macro-economic indicators and the halt in the decline in living conditions seemed to restore - at least partially and temporarily - confidence for the Socialists and their leader. Organizational rivalries among party bodies and ideological confrontations were dampened in the name of discipline and loyalty. The SZDSZ also came to face serious challenges. It suffered from a loss of party identity and autonomy as junior partner in coalition with a party of a very different political culture, yet was not been willing to risk isolation outside the government. A party with a heritage of moral resistance, it found itself involved in dubious affairs. It had to but was not able to make the difficult choice between the prevailing economic reductionism and late-Kádárian distortion of liberal policies versus standing up for its declared republican ethos. And finally, its middle class clientele became alienated by the restrictive monetarist policies with which the party was associated. Thus, as to the cleavage basis of the politics and policies of the governing - simultaneously leftist (from the point of view of culture) and rightist (from the point of view of the economy)- parties, with the Socialists reasserting their dominant position and the Free Democrats losing their authentic and independent identity, we witnessed a syndrome of mutually reinforcing cleavages. Westernization, resulting from a cumulation of cultural and territorial cleavages was the decisive option. Its social content was externally determined, a logical consequence of the centre-periphery relation: it was the victory of commodification representing the actual interests of the economic elites, of the winners of the transformation. Due to the circumstance that the new managerial ruling class had its origin in the late-Kádárian technocracy, Westernization and commodification were intertwined with the post-Socialist cleavage side. However, a considerable number of old and middle-aged leftist voters remained loyal to the Socialists, even if their interests were hurt and their values disregarded in public policies. On the side of the traditionalist parties two contradictory tendencies emerged. The first tendency was a corresponding cumulation of cleavages, a response to the Westernization bloc: decommodification tied to nationalist-clericalist positions and to anticommunism. An inherent consequence was the radicalization of party competition. The second tendency was a divide between a more militant, demagogic wing and a more pragmatic wing, amounting to a bipolarity. The rivalry between Torgyánism as social nationalism, the program of demagogic antiliberal populism and social redistributionism represented in 1995 and 1996 by József Torgyán, leader of the Smallholders and the more moderate approach of the Young Democrats (FIDESZ) lead to a crumbling of the other parties of the traditionalist-nationalist opposition. Power conflicts emerged and escalated both in the Forum and the Christian Democrats. In January 1996 half of the Parliamentary group of the MDF left the party and formed the moderate and pragmatic Hungarian Democratic People’s Party (MDNP), in response to the victory of the more populist wing in the Forum. Things, however, changed very soon. The MDNP remained isolated and without any significant popular support. The Forum also stepped upon the road to failing the 5% threshold. While FIDESZ - according to János Kis, former leader of SZDSZ - was occupying the political space of the MDF of the early nineties , MDF (i.e. the rest of MDF) concluded an alliance with the Young Democrats. The struggle for power and for ideological purity was even more self-destructive for the Christian Democrats. The scandalous victory of party leader György Giczy standing even closer to the fascistoid Party of Hungarian Truth and Life than to J. Torgyán'' Smallholders was followed by the self-liquidation of the parliamentary group of the KDNP: the moderate majority of Christian Democratic MP’s joined FIDESZ. These developments, however, lead us to a new chapter in party competition in Hungary. REFERENCES Lipset, S. M. 1993. The Social Requisites of Democracy Revisited. Presid. Address ASA, Manuscript. Harvey, D. 1994. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge-Oxford. Sartori, G. 1968. “Political Development and Political Engineering”, in Public Policy, no. 17: 261-298. Márkus, G. Gy. 1994. “Parties, Camps and Cleavages in Hungary”, in M. Waller et al., ed., Social Democracy a Post-Communist Europe. London, pp. 154-170. Sartori op.cit. Révész, S. 1995. Antall József távolról. Budapest. Lipset, S. M. 1959. Political Man.New York, p. 84. Révész op.cit., p. 121. Révész op.cit., p. 120. Ágh, A. 1994. The Revival of Mixed Traditions: Democracy and Authoritarian Renewal in East Central Europe. Budapest Papers on Democratic Transition, no. 92. Sartori op.cit. The Democratic Charta as a political movement initiated in August 1991 by PEN President György Konrád (member of SZDSZ) and soon supported by thousands of liberal, social liberal and socialist intellectuals was directed against the Kulturkampf radicaliaztion tendencies in the MDF government. Peaking from 1991 to 1994, it served as an umbrella organization to various demands: a reawakening of civil society drained by party pluralism; an opposition to authoritarian tendencies expressing a democratic consensus; an experimental field for a liberal-socialist political alliance. (see: Bozóki, András. 1997. “The Politics of Movement-Intellectuals after the Regime Change: The Democratic Charta in Hungary,” in Politikatudományi Szemle, no.1.: 237.) Szelényi, I. 1994. “Menedzser-kapitalizmus”, in Magyar Lettre International, vol. 19: 21-29. Kulin, F. 1995. “Mitől nemzeti?”, in Magyar Nemzet, 19. Sept. This seems to confirm Sartori’s thesis that the party system becomes structured in response to the rise of a mass party although that author’s corollary that such a party also contributes to the structural consolidation of the party system has not yet been apparent. (Sartori op.cit.) Magyar Nemzet, 21. Oct. 1995. Kis, J. 1996. “A rendszerváltásnak vége”, in Beszélő, August-September, pp. 4-10. J. Kis op.cit.  CHAPTER FOUR The Restructuring of the Party System: NATO referendum 1997 - Parliamentary Elections 1998 The issue of euro-atlantic integration and political cleavages A major point of Stein Rokkan's political theory is that there is a cleavage creating interaction between geographical spaces and socio-cultural membership spaces, between center formation and boundary building. This rather abstract thesis can be translated into the language of actual politics by referring to the fact that the issue of NATO and EC(EU) membership has played a central role in Hungary from the very beginning of the transformation. Beginning with Gyula Horns's amazing pro-NATO statements while minister of foreign affairs in 1988, at a time when the Warsaw Treaty still existed and multipartism was just in its pre-parliamentary stage, continuing with József. Antall, prime minister following the first post-communist free elections and ending the list with V. Orbán, would-be prime minister by June-July 1998, all responsible heads of the Hungarian polity have pursued a consequent pro-integration course. NATO and EU membership have had both symbolic and practically relevant significance for the citizens and political leaders of this country. Despite the close to consensual character of this issue, there are variations of approach including different measures of identification and opposition rooted in the cleavage pattern of Hungarian society and politics. As to the family of territorial and cultural cleavages, simultaneously with an overall support on the side of westernization, of exogenous catch-up modernization there is a split and ambivalence on the side of the traditionalists. Their majority position is to look upon NATO and EU as providing guarantees of independent Hungarian statehood, as protectors and promoters of national existence and survival. There are, however, radically nationalist political actors, able to find followers, who stress the threats to distinct statehood and nationhood and are inclined to see hostile colonial powers in these supranational organizations. From the point of view of the post-communist cleavage family, the small groups of surviving communists are natural opponents to NATO and are highly sceptical concerning European integration. The (old-new) political, economic and post-communist elites are strongly pro-NATO and pro-EU. This attitude reflects their market and power interests and their need for and source of legitimacy. Euro-atlantic orientation is also present - though less intense and less homogenous - in the broad segments of the population attached to late-Kádárian values with the centrality of security and stability. As to the socio-economic dimension of cleavages, we see a marked 'yes' position on the side of the winners, and a division on the losers' side: hope and hopelessness, i.e. anxiety and apathy are the alternatives. If we take into consideration the decided opposition to NATO of very small pacifist groups of young intellectuals, we might see the embryonic shape of a post-materialist cleavage. Comparing the survey data from 1994 and 1998 on the support of euro-atlantic integration, we see a rise of NATO support from 48 to 71%, while as to the EU, the affirmative rating has stayed constant (75%) and the "No" has increased from 9 to 14%. Taking into account party sympathies, we have the following picture shown in the next table: Table Support of NATO and EU membership according to party sympathies Party support NATO yes EU yes 1994 1998 1994 1998 FIDESZ 55 75 75 80 FKGP 54 61 72 69 MDF 63 62 81 65 MIÉP 73 41 80 50 MSZP 42 86 79 85 SZDSZ 56 84 82 88 non-voters 44 60 69 65 Source: MEDIAN, Népszava, May 30 1998 There is a similarity in the cleavage based attitude of party sympathizers to NATO and EU. We may detect also some regional, social and demographic characteristics in the very strong support of the followers of radical westernizing parties (Socialists, Free Democrats), in the definite rejection by the racist MIÉP and in the somewhat weaker acceptance by the followers of parties with a more marked nationalist appeal (Smallholders, MDF and Christian Democrats).We witness a quite high measure of support by voters of FIDESZ becoming a party of 'soft' (organic and smooth) Westernization. We might add that in the case of somewhat sceptical parties(from the point of view of westernization), like MDF and Smallholders, party leaders are generally more pro-Western than party activists and sympathizers. An affinity of the two issues is demonstrated by the increased speed of the citizens in turning towards both EU and NATO in 1997, when the invitation to NATO, with an effect of agenda setting, mobilized EU support also. There is, however, a difference between the political reflections of these two issues rooted in the same basic territorial cleavage. While the security-centred NATO issue demands a clear and unambiguous 'Yes' or 'No' attitude, the issue of European integration as to its mode of realization leaves a number of economic, political and cultural questions open. Two sets of unresolved problems are here of special importance: one is the intensity of articulating particularistic national and subnational interests versus supranational community positions, the other is the choice between the rival alternatives of a federalist and of a less tightly united Europe. The slight quantitative difference of integration support between pro-Western FIDESZ and the pro-Western parties of the socialist-liberal coalition might be attributed to a qualitative conceptual difference. While the latter two parties prefer smoother negotiations of accession and are more ready to accept the criteria defined in Brussels, FIDESZ insists more on modifying some previously fixed conditions, especially regarding agriculture and the mobility problems of ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries. Without being adequately conscious of the real alternatives, the Hungarian public is divided concerning the issue of a federalist versus a more nation state-centered Europe. (The majority seems to favour the second option in a proportion of 46 to 38. ). An importante difference of a Socialist versus a FIDESZ lead government in European strategy is also manifest in the bias towards a federalist versus an intergovernmental approach to the process of European integration. Thus, a pro-European option does not exclude cleavage related policy alternatives. NATO Referendum: the Mixing of Cleavage Sides The NATO referendum took place in November 1997 with a 85% approval and with a 49% rate of participation. The referendum revealed a marked regional divide: a strong pro-NATO attitude of Western regions and Budapest, a negative and/or sceptical attitude in under-developed Eastern and Southern regions. The high share of old age pensioners in the pro-NATO vote came as a surprise: more than 40% of the yes came from this group contributing also to the fact that not only 80% of the people with higher education, but also 83% of those with low education (8 classes) were among the voters for NATO. A steady rise of a convincing majority for NATO had characterized the period from autumn 1996 to September 1997. In the period of late September and early October, however, a change of the trend was observed: among citizens with the intention to participate in the referendum the number of supporters decreased by 7, while opponents rose by 5%. By the second half of October the original trend was restored with a disproportionate 7 to 10% increase among the sympathizers of the Socialists and the Free Democrats. No external or domestic factors outside the political sphere were responsible for the temporary, but marked decrease of NATO support. Hungarian NATO membership was jeopardized by an irresponsible tactical maneuvering of political actors. What happened on the level of agenda setting by political parties? In mid-1997 the government had proposed an amendment of law to allow corporate bodies to purchase land. This, it was argued by the traditionalist opposition parties, would empower foreigners to buy Hungarian soil. In August 1997 MDF started to collect signatures initiating a referendum for the prohibition of land purchase by foreigners. FIDESZ, with the aspiration to be the leading force in an anti-post-communist bloc, took up this initiative to gain terrain in the national identity dominated political space. The move also served to demonstrate the rural commitment of FIDESZ. In an action supported by radical and moderate traditionalist and anti-(post-)communist parties 300, 000 signatures were collected. Following the idea of FIDESZ and MDF, the opposition demanded that the referendum on NATO membership should be combined with a referendum on the prohibition of land purchase by foreigners. The government was put on the defensive and accepted this linkage, although insisted on putting its own questions on land property representing a softer approach on the limitation of land purchase by foreigners. The Constitutional Court, however rejected the questions of the government on land property. A chaotic situation emerged for a while, but in a 'last minute' (late October) move, Parliament returned to the original single-issue NATO referendum. The parliamentary parties engaged themselves in a pro-NATO campaign. This resulted in a restoration of NATO support, and converted moderate opponents into absentees.The explanation of this contradictory development can be found, if we apply our cleavage typology. The voluntarist linkage of the land property and the NATO membership issues proved to be confusing, since it coupled two opposite cleavage sides. One question of the referendum was to suggest the support of a particularist national identity, a traditionalist community defense in the face of the process of integration and globalization. The other, i.e. the original NATO related question implied the support of a basic act of westernization, of the membership in a universalist organization, the involvement in the process of supranational integration. There was another paradox in this episode. As the Socialist Party, a post-communist political force became the issue leader, some of the most militant anti-Communist segments of the electorate and of the political forces turned to be - temporarily at least -sceptical and hesitant of NATO membership. This chaotic episode was, in our view, a prelude to the realignment on the level of the parties and of the electorate manifest in the 1998 election: the formation of an anti-post-communist alliance incorporating the traditionalist forces and appealing also to the losers of the transformation. This was the FIDESZ strategy and resembled in many aspects the post-Solidarity course in Poland at that time. The 1998 elections National elections in May 1998 changed not only parliamentary majorities, but also modified the pattern of party competition. The post-communist cleavage family of the political system - closely tied to the cultural divides concerning the radicalism of westernization and the radicalism of marketization and commodification in the economy - became the main axis of political mobilization. The party system itself started and sice then continues to move towards more concentration, towards bipolarity. Before coming to look upon the changes of the party landscape, let us summarize the general political climate in the months preceding the elections. 1. Due to improvements in the economic field, and to the feeling of security provided by the invitation to NATO, the progress of the country towards EU membership, a modest, but steady rise of general optimism came about. In contrast with 1995, when the Bokros package was introduced, the share of pessimists dropped from 8o to 53%. by the end of 1997. 2. Dissatisfaction with the development of democracy (64%), the weakness of pro-market attitudes (31%), the positive assessment (58%) of the former regime compared to the post-1989 regime, did not, however, change. 3. The general feeling of intolerance towards 'others' increased. Every second Hungarian openly expressed, his or her dislike of Gypsies, while in 1994 'only' 40% did that. As to party supporters, the greatest deviation from the national average index of tolerance was to be found among the Smallholders' and the Free Democrats' voters (minus 37, plus 37), while Socialists' and Young Democrats' supporters were closer to the average. (Data on the racist MIÉP were not published.) 4. Both on the level of protest actions (e.g. against foreigners' land property purchase) and on the level of surveys, a widespread mood for the support of a national identity and national interest based 'third road' development could be identified, i.e. a kind of a patriotic criticism of market inequalities. 5. The social context of sharply increasing criminality and the continuing presence of patronage and clientelism favored the tendencies of cynicism and apathy towards political parties in general, but especially hit the governing parties. Party posturing in the pre-election period MSZP Similarly to the "Carry on, Germany" (Weiter so, Deutschland) slogan of Chancellor Kohl in the early 90s, Gyula Horn's Socialist Party based its campaign on the silent communication of a success story with the result of bringing the country into the entry gates of NATO and EU, of restoring macroeconomic stability, opening the prospects of a financially sustainable growth and a gradual improvement of living conditions. The basic message was the TINA declaration: There is No Alternative which, for a while, seemed to be accepted. About two months, before the May elections, the open question seemed to be not whether the MSZP would win or not, but it would do so with an absolute majority or only with a strong relative majority. The opposition parties were looked upon by MSZP leaders as hopelessly divided and unable to offer a realistic and coherent policy alternative. The issue at stake appeared to be the confirmation or the rejection of the permanence of the power of the actually dominant elites with their inherited and reestablished rules of the game pointing also to a generation conflict. This attitude implied and also strengthened the centrality of the post-communist versus anti-post-communist cleavage family. As to the socio-economic cleavages, MSZP had little to offer for losers and for wage-earners in general inspite of a social democratic self-definition and of a welfare-statist majority of a society heavily hit by restrictions and by unequal opportunities. SZDSZ Putting aside humiliations by the senior partner, the Free Democrats adopted a defensive and loyal strategy. Stressing the policy achievements in the fields of foreign policy, i.e. westernization, and economics, i.e. commodification, acting party leaders declared: 'may be, what we did, was not optimal for the party, but it was good for the country'. Their, election slogan "to keep the good direction" was a minimized correction effort in face of post-communism implying the message: if we were not in power with 'them', 'they' would not be controlled, 'they' would not do the right things. This almost schizophrenic ambivalence alienated voters and activists, split the party elite and did not win the sympathies of post-communists either. FKGP The climate prevailing after the introduction of the Bokros package helped a spectacular rise of the Smallholders in opinion polls. This position contributed to an escalation of radical nationalist, populist, anti-liberal and anti-Communist positions in the party. Following however a mass rally in March 1996 where Torgyán demanded - among others - the 'extermination of liberal worms' and the like, public attitude dramatically changed in favour of the Socialists, a clear punishment for radicalization. Thus, the pre-election posturing of the FKGP was rather ambivalent: Torgyán tried to demonstrate a move to the center, professional competence, a rejection of extremist tendencies without giving up the stance of an anti-elite protest party on the basis of strong emotionally appealing nationalism. He even expelled his vice-president, Mrs. Maczó who had engaged in direct support of civil disobedience actions of farmers and was becoming famous for anti-semitic phraseology. Thus, the remaining demagogic radicalism of Torgyán was too much for one part of the electorate who presumably tended to sympathize with FIDESZ, and for the other - for the frustrated losers - too little. The latter voters seem to have moved towards Csurka's racist party. FIDESZ Following the bad showing in the 1994 elections, FIDESZ started a very conscious strategy of rebuilding itself as a leading catch-all-party of anti-post-communism. (This model is essentially similar to the Polish post-Solidarity strategy preceding the 1997 elections.) 1. The first step was to make clear its commitment to the national-Christian, moderately traditionalist cleavage side. Party leader Viktor Orbán was successful in creating the image of being a reincarnation of late József Antall, MDF leader and prime minister. The divisions and splits in the bloc of the traditionalist parties helped FIDESZ to ally with or simply to absorb the moderate rightist forces. FIDESZ used an early MDF like rhetoric appealing to nationalist and religious emotions. It received more than the implicit support of the Catholic Church. FIDESZ was also able to mobilize along the rural side of territorial cleavages. 2. In response to the Bokros package, FIDESZ appealed strongly to the middle class losers, especially to the young by demonstrating a welfare statist and Keynesian image. In a public debate in the finish of the campaign with Gyula Horn, Viktor. Orbán even claimed that his party of the young generation would realize basic points of the Socialist Party's unfulfilled promises from 1993/94 concerning social security and living standards. The other side of the coin was to appeal to entrepreneurs, especially to small and middle scale enterprises of Hungarian owners with a commitment to tax cuts and to supply side growth induction. 3. FIDESZ had also a message for the alienated libertarian SZDSZ voters in presenting itself as a party of national liberalism committed to euro-atlantic integration and in contrast to the Free Democrats the authentic and efficient political force to be the alternative to post-communism. Lessons from the elections of May 1998 FIDESZ, originally a party of radical Westernization emerged as the winning party to be entrusted with government building. It could mobilize anti-post-communist voters from all directions, especially in the second round when more than 80 Smallholder candidates were withdrawn in favour of the Young Democrats, an act with the explicit price: the demand and the necessity of government participation of a party from the opposite side of the central cultural cleavage. - MSZP is the second strongest party in Parliament, although numerically it collected more votes than FIDESZ. This contradiction is explained partly by the combined effect (in the second round of elections based on the majority principle in constituencies) of 1. the unity of anti-post-communists votes, favouring FIDESZ and 2. the deviation inherent in the system. -We see a marginalization of the former hegemonic parties of the regime change: of the Forum and of the Free Democrats. MDF did not reach the minimum threshold with its party list (PR) votes. It could come into the Parliament only through a handful of FIDESZ-supported constituency-based MPs. - The relatively strong 6% showing of MIÉP resulted in the Parliamentary presence of an openly chauvinistic and racist party. - We witness a 'balancing' role of the nationalist and populist Smallholders with an unaccountable leader oscillating between radical and moderate positions participating in government. In the above mentioned tendencies we see a confirmation of our thesis according to which cleavage related political alternatives have 'frozen' since 1988/89, but the fates and the identities of the parties have been repeatedly changing. There are declared intentions for the creation of a united moderately traditionalist party by FIDESZ in the non-distant future. This is resisted both by the Smallhoders, and the MDF. The pattern of voting attitudes seems to have undergone some relevant changes: In previous elections there had been moderately active participation in the first, and a markedly reduced participation in the second round with a 'winner takes all' type of cumulative confirmation of the initial outcome. Now, the first round with a participation remaining slightly under 50% seemed to express a marked divide between an apolitical and alienated part of the population and a participatory segment. When, however, the impression prevailed that there was a real stake in the elections, seven percent more went to the polls, an unprecedented participation in the second round, pointing to the existence of a social cleavage basis of parties on the supply side of the electoral market. -The proportion of party votes cast in both rounds differed from the previous pattern of the prevailing attitudes of protest votes: instead of the general mood of voting somebody out, the relative balance between the two poles of competition pointed to a learning process, to the gradual emergence of a structurally cleaved electorate, to a bipolar party system. The cleavage axes of party competition - hypothetical propositions. 1. The anti-post-communist cleavage family has re-emerged as the dominant dimension of party competition. It is only partially a replay of the 1989-1990 battle which was more purely ideological. Ideological penetration is ever harsher, media war and Kulturkapmf are renewed, but they all serv one thing: a zero-sum game of power, the occupation of key positions in administration, in the economy, in culture in the public media etc. A kind of illiberal democracy is taking shape with a confrontational political culture, the central position of the prime minister legitimated by national-Christian ideology, by historicized rituals, by Americanized political marketing devices, by stick and carrot methos of clientele building. 2. If we compare the present party alignment along the axis of cultural and territorial cleavages with the configurations in 1990 and 1994, we might note the following changes and new features: -.FIDESZ seems to have succeeded- in a much more convincing way than Antall's MDF government - in occupying a mediating position between exogenous catch-up modernization and traditionalism. It is likely to pursue policies of a more identity based 'soft' westernization or endogenous modernization. It might combine the commitment of being part of supranational globalization and of a European integration process and the position of resistance against 'too much' adjustment. It seems to be dedicated to the defense of cultural and territorial distinctiveness. But there is also an openness towards more radical natinalism, which can lead either to a future government partipation of MIÉP and/or to attracting potential MIÉP voters. - A feature of the cultural-territorial cleavage dimension in the 1998 elections has been a reinvigorated intensity of the urban-rural divide, with the new strongholds of FIDESZ in the - mostly western - modernizing regions of the countryside, with the strongholds of the Socialists in the capital, in the cities and regions of "socialist modernization" and the traditional agrarian areas East of the Danube of the Smallholders - As to the dramatic decline of the Free Democrats, their adjustment to the post-communist structures is only one explanatory factor. A more profound explanation may be attempted if we question the compatibility of a social libertarian ethos with the harsh exigencies of a sweeping and rapid capitalist transformation and of the imperatives of a painful adjustment to globalized markets. This is not a spontaneous or organic process, but one that has to be steered from above in the context of an underdeveloped civil society. Can libertarian principles render practically functioning mechanisms for this transition or do they contain just imperatives reminding the elites and the public of seemingly abstract norms? Is, perhaps, the reliance on ideological concepts of national and cultural identities implying a strong and centralized active state or on post-communist statist and lobbyist methods a more efficient way of serving transition, the cohesion of a transforming society? 3. A paradoxical consequence of the freezing of political cleavages in 1989-1990 is the remaining relative weakness of the socio-economic cleavage family, in spite of the increasing relevance of this conflict for the population. The translation of this basic divide into party politics and public policies has remained ambivalent. the commodification-decommodification, i.e. the winner-loser cleavage family has not become a clear structural axis of the party system. Some important tendencies, however, can be demonstrated: A voting pattern has emerged in support of parties promising most convincingly a smooth policy of transformation and the corresponding punishing protest vote against the same parties not keeping their promises. In 1998, there has been a modification in this trend: for one part of the losers, ideological and cultural political identification with the MSZP has proven to be stronger than the impact of their actual economic situation. This syndrome has demonstrated a generational and regional correlation: these people belong to the elderly lower middle classes, live in the 'socialist' housing blocs of Budapest and some cities of 'socialist industrialization' and in some backward rural areas. We have witnessed the rapprochement between culturally rightist positions tied to the protection of religious and national identity and 'leftist', i.e. welfare statist positions. This is the explanation of the non-radical economic policy of the MDF government, of the rise of the Smallholders following the introduction of the Bokros package, in 1995, and of the 'leftist' component in the electoral strategy of FIDESZ in 1997/98 together with the occupation of the emptied space of moderate traditionalism. The movements of the parties across the economic faultline have also been also a function of their governing or opposition roles, expressing the environmental and external constraints of policy making. This was quite clear in the monetarist-neoliberal turn of the MSZP in 1995. FIDESZ having promised welfare statist policy changes in 19998, continued a strict fiscal policy but is preparing Keynesian income-supporting measures for 2001, the year before the next elections. CONCLUDING REMARKS IN MID-SEPTEMBER 2000 The cleavage structure behind party politics as it has emerged in the course of the critical juncture of domestic regime change and of the collapse of the Soviet Empire has frozen. The "frozen cleavages - fluid parties" syndrome has brought about some modifications in the contents of cleavages and in important cases has reshaped parties, both to their location in the cleavage structure and to their weight. The mutually reinforcing character of cleavages, on one side, has increased, and political elites, especially on the national-traditionalist side, have been able to impose their ideological cleavages on broader parts of the electorate. The party system is practically dominated by two parties with different approach to socio-cultural cleavages: while the Socialists with their genesis in the late years of a market socialism type society has remained a catch-all-party embedded in social divides and their party is itself cleaved on basic issues, Fidesz with its origin of a power-conscious generation has instrumentalized cleavages. As a free-rider of cleavages rationally selecting from them, coming to opposite sides of divides (from anti-nationalism to preoccupation with nationhood, from secularism to clericalism, from market liberalism to centralizing redistribution etc.). .Disciplined media-conformity on one-side, unresolved programmatic debates on the other - with all the leadership consequences. The actually decisive cleavage in the political sub system (the anti-/post/-communist opposition) has acquired a new dimension: The national-Christian traditionalist side is divided into a mainstream of majoritarian rule and a radical minority of anti-democratic aspirations. The common denominator can be called illiberal democracy. The present 'left wing' opposition (a strong socialist and a weak liberal party) are adherents of consensual democracy. (The power dimension is thus strongly intertwined with a political culture dimension.) The confrontation on the content of democracy is pointing to the Rokkanian thesis on the correlation between (the concept of) boundaries and internal power structure. We can hardly see up to now a marked articulation of a substantive socio-economic cleavage, the only remarkable difference is the stronger or weaker role to be played by the state (the executive). 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