Centre-right has landslide win in Hungarian election

The centre-right Fidesz Party has won power from the ruling Socialists after winning over half the vote in Sunday’s Hungarian parliamentary elections. Fidesz performed as well as the opinion polls had predicted and won 52.8 of the vote which translates to a healthy majority of 206 seats in the 386 seat legislature. The socialists were routed and ended up with just 28 seats barely two more than gained by the far right Jobbik Party. The Greens also passed the threshold to get into parliament, securing five seats. A second round of voting follows on April 25 to elect another 121 members but Fidesz already has the numbers to rule outright.

Nevertheless the second round of voting is important as they are in sight of a two-thirds majority it needs to push through vital reforms. The victory will see Fidesz party leader Victor Orban take the prime minister’s job for the second rule. The Oxford educated Orban is a veteran of Hungarian politics despite being just 46 years old. He was a foundation member of Fidesz (an acronym of FIatal DEmokraták SZövetsége which means "Alliance of Young Democrats" ) in 1988 at the end of the Communist era. He took over the leadership of the party two years later in the first free elections and became Hungary’s second youngest ever Prime Minister in 1998 after he led a Coalition to victory. He oversaw Hungary’s admission into NATO but was beset by scandals which helped him lose office in 2002. Fidesz were defeated again in 2006 but with his leadership secure Orban was in a position to capitalise this time round on electoral dissatisfaction with the Socialists savage budget cuts.

With unemployment running at 11.4 percent and an economy that contracted by 6.3 percent in 2009 Orhan faces a massive task to avoid the same fate despite his strong mandate. Fidesz campaigned on cutting taxes, creating jobs and supporting local businesses but was hazy about how to deliver on a promise to create a million jobs in 10 years. Fidesz has also said could double the deficit target set by the IMF and EU as part of a rescue package by slashing local government and implementing efficiencies in health care and education.

Besides Orhan’s routing of the ruling party, the elections other big talking point was the dangerous rise of Jobbik. The anti-semitic and anti-gypsy party came from nowhere in the last four years capitalising on discontent with the major parties. Led by 32-year-old history teacher Gabor Vona, the party tapped into nationalist sentiment of shame over Hungary’s reputation as a sick economy. Jobbik campaigned on a platform of blaming Jews and the Roma for Hungary’s ills and their rise brings back uncomfortable memories of the Nazi era. Much of their support was in poor rural areas with high unemployment and they were helped organisationally by the Magyar Garda (Hungarian Guard) a paramilitary group with black uniforms to the Arrow Cross, Hungary's original Nazi party. Though the Guard was disbanded by court order last year for breaking association law in continues under an assumed name. Vona is a founding member of the Magyar Garda.

Prime Minister in waiting Orhan has said he is deeply unhappy with Jobbik’s rise and has no plans to bring them into a coalition. He will be relying on an improvement in the economy to curb their growing appeal. Orban said good governing was the best defense against the far right. “I am convinced that the better the performance of the government is, the weaker the far right will be in the future,” he said. However it is also likely Orhan will restrain Jobbik’s influence by embracing its social conservatism and family values while adopting its tough attitudes on law and order.

Blood on the streets of Budapest

Yesterday Budapest marked the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the Hungarian Revolution. History is repeating itself as police used tear gas and rubber bullets to quell protesters against the current government who disrupted anniversary celebrations. Demonstrators have been on the streets for the last month protesting against Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany after he admitted lying to win re-election. Veterans of the 1956 uprising refused to shake hands with him at Monday's commemoration and the main opposition party said it was boycotting events where he was due to speak. By the end of the day it was difficult to tell whether marchers were celebrating the anniversary of the revolution or protesting against the government.

The events of the fortnight following 23 October 1953 were astonishing. It was the first major challenge to Soviet military power since the violence that ended World War II. What began as a student demonstration turned into a full scale revolution. It was eventually destroyed by the might of the Soviet Red Army. The revolution was a wildfire that quickly engulfed the country. It caused the fall of the central government in Budapest for two weeks before the Russians intervened to crush the rebellion.

Hungary fought on the side of Germany during the War. Its Second Army was annihilated at Stalingrad and Hungary looked to make peace with the Soviets. As a result Hitler ordered Nazi troops to occupy Hungary and forced its government to increase its contribution to the war effort. When the Soviets invaded Hungary in 1944, they quickly signed an armistice which was repudiated by Germany. The country became a battlefield and the last Nazi troops did not leave Hungary until April 1945. Even before the war had ended, Churchill had agreed with Stalin the Soviet Union would enjoy 80 percent influence in Hungary, with Britain retaining the rest. Communists were part of a provisional government that took power after the war.

In November 1945, the non-communist Independent Smallholders' Party won power in an election. The communists used what one of their own leaders called “salami tactics” to gradually increase power by discrediting and arresting opponents. The Communist leader Rakosi took control of the police and set up a secret unit called the AVH. The Smallholders party was slowly marginalised and eventually made illegal. In 1947 relations between the Soviets and the West deteriorated markedly. Stalin pushed for the creation of a Soviet state in Hungary and the Communists quickly took control. In 1949 the regime held a single-list election, and later that year the government ratified a Soviet-style constitution. The Hungarian economy was reorganised according to the Soviet model. But it was performing dismally. Stalin’s death led to a new breed of leaders including Imre Nagy. Nagy freed political prisoners and ended the forced collectivisation of Hungarian agriculture. Hardline Communists regained control in 1955 and Nagy was forced to step down. But Nagy still had much support in the community. Hungarians were resentful that much of the food and industrial goods they produced were sent to Russia while the local population starved.

On 23 October 1956, students in Budapest held a rally in support of Polish efforts to win autonomy from the Soviet Union. It sparked mass demonstrations of 200,000 people. The police attacked, and the demonstrators fought back tearing down Soviet symbols. Alarmed, the Communist leaders called out the Hungarian army, but many soldiers handed their weapons to the demonstrators and joined the uprising instead. The following day, Soviet troops entered Budapest. This further enraged the Hungarians and the day saw many pitched battles with troops and state security police. The extremely popular Nagy was named Prime Minister on 25 October. He brought non-Communists into the government. He dissolved the hated AVH secret police and promised free elections. For most of the next 12 days, Hungarians fought the Soviets in ferocious street battles. The Soviet ambassador Yuri Andropov (who led the USSR briefly before his death in 1984) publicly agreed to remove their forces from Hungary but they secretly sent new armoured divisions instead.

When Nagy found out the double-cross, he was enraged. He immediately withdrew Hungary from the Warsaw Pact and called on the West to support it as a neutral nation. But the west was otherwise engaged in the Suez Crisis. The Israelis had invaded Sinai, and a day later, the British and French had bombed Egypt, hoping to force the country to reopen the recently nationalised Suez Canal. President Eisenhower kept the US out of the Suez issue and was also sympathetic to the freedom movements in Eastern Europe. But he was not prepared to go to war to save Hungary. The US secretly told the Soviets that Hungary was in their sphere of influence and would not protest if the Soviets ended the revolution.

The Soviet response was devastating. On 3 November Red Army troops bolstered by regiments from Eastern Asia surrounded Budapest and closed the country's borders. The Asian troops could speak no European languages and were told they were going to Berlin to fight German fascists. Overnight they entered the capital and occupied the parliament building. They easily overpowered the poorly armed local forces. Nagy fled to the Yugoslav embassy as the Hungarian Communists announced on state radio that they had regained control. The head of the Hungarian Catholic Church, the remarkable Cardinal Mindszenty (recently released after being had been imprisoned for 8 years after the war) sought refuge in the US embassy. He was to live there for the next 15 years until the Hungarian government let him leave the country. Meanwhile 200,000 Hungarians fled across to Austria before being re-settled in the West.

Over the next five years, Hungary executed 2,000 rebels and imprisoned another 25,000. Nagy was arrested and apparently deported. However two years later, Hungary admitted he was secretly tried and executed. A bitter Hungarian joke of the time expresses local sentiment:
Two men meet on the street after the revolution.
First man: you know, come to think of it, we Hungarians are very lucky people
Second man: What? You don’t mean you’ve become one of them?
First man: Oh no, but just think. The Russians came here as friends. Imagine what they’d have done if they came as enemies.

The major gallops on

"Look at that little fat chap. We'll murder this lot." These were the intemperate words of an English footballer as they took the field at Wembley to play Hungary in 1953. The "little fat chap" was Ferenc Puskas, the Hungarian captain. He was short, stocky, barrel-chested, slightly overweight, could only shoot with his left foot and couldn't head the ball. Despite all these shortcomings, he and his team had the last laugh slaughtering England 6-3 and in the process being the first continental team to win at Wembley. Puskas scored two goals in that game among a remarkable 84 in just 85 games for his country.

Today, Ferenc Puskas is recovering after being taken into intensive care into a Budapest hospital this week. The 79-year-old Puskas has been living in Budapest's Kutvolgyi Hospital with Alzheimer's disease since 2000 and went into intensive care earlier this week. Puskas is idolised in Hungary where has the nickname Ocsi Bacsi “our little brother”. His more famous nickname to the rest of the world is The Galloping Major after his Hungarian army rank at the time he became world famous. Puskas was the captain of Hungary’s “golden team” of the 1950s before going on to great success with Real Madrid winning the first five European cups between 1956 and 1960.

Puskas was born in 1927 in Budapest. He made an early impression making his debut for his father's old team Kispest at the age of 16. At aged 18 he made his first international appearance for Hungary against Austria in 1945. After the war, military teams sprang up all over Eastern Europe under the auspices of the new Soviet masters. In Hungary the authorities took the Kispest club and all their players and turned them into Honved, the team of the Hungarian Army. Because Communist sports teams were technically amateurs, they could compete in the Olympic Games. Puskas was captain of his country when they took the soccer gold medal by defeating Yugoslavia in the final at Helsinki in 1952.

By 1954, Hungary were the hot favourites to win the World Cup in Switzerland. Just to show that their earlier victory over England wasn’t a fluke, they demolished them 7-1 in Budapest. Going into the tournament, the Magical Magyars hadn't lost for four years. They scored 17 goals in their first two games of the finals. They beat South Korea 9-0, and then thrashed Germany 8-3. But this win came at a cost. Their captain and talisman Puskas was injured and missed the quarter-final against Brazil, a brutal game that went down in football history as the Battle of Berne. Hungary won and after the game, the Brazilians invaded the Hungarian dressing room claiming that Puskas had attacked and wounded their centre-half while watching from the touchline. In the ensuing fight, players hit each other with bottles and football boots.

Puskas's damaged ankle kept him out of the semi-final against Uruguay who had never lost a World Cup match. Hungary won 4-2 in extra time. The final was a rematch with West Germany who they had annihilated in the early rounds. Captain Puskas declared himself fit, but it was a controversial decision. According to Brian Glanville in his book, The Story of the World Cup: "Puskas, clearly hampered by his ankle, was unwontedly heavy and slow." Nonetheless, Hungary led 2-0 after just eight minutes with Puskas getting the second goal. The gamble looked like it was paying off. But the Hungarians' game began to go awry. Germany pulled back to 2-2, and then took the lead through Rahn. With minutes to go Puskas broke clear and slid the ball past the German keeper Turek. Welsh linesman Mervyn Griffiths had his flag up. The goal was disallowed for offside. West Germany held on to win 3-2 and caused one of the football upsets of the century to win the World Cup. Hungary, having conquered all before them, had been beaten in the most important game of all.

The 1956 Hungarian uprising changed Puskas’s life forever. He was with the rest of his Honved team-mates playing a European Cup tie in Bilbao, Spain when the revolution took place. Puskas, and two of his team-mates Kocsis and Czibor, defected to the West. The trio were banned for a year. Although Czibor and Kocsis soon found employment with Barcelona, Puskas was less fortunate – as his weight increased his stock fell, with no clubs willing to take a risk on him. Puskas spent a year in neighbouring Austria, but was unable to get a playing permit. He wanted to play in Italy, but he piled on weight as he drifted aimlessly around Europe. Having turned 30 he was considered too old and too fat. He was rescued from ignominy by his old Honved manager Emil Oestreicher, now in charge at Real Madrid. The Spanish team had been turned into a club that dominated Europe by the vision of their president, Santiago Bernabeu. They had won the first European Cup in 1956 and had retained it the following year. Among their star players were centre-forward Alfredo Di Stefano, a naturalised Argentinean, and Francisco Gento, the flying winger.

In 1958, Oestreicher took a gamble on the 31-year-old overweight Puskas. The player rejected by the Italians struck up a sensational partnership with Di Stefano and was four times the leading scorer in the Spanish Championship. They retained the European Cup in 1958 and again a year later. This magnificent Real side climaxed in their fifth straight final in 1960 played in front a European record crowd of 135,000 at Hampden Park, Glasgow. Puskas scored 4 and di Stefano 3 as they trounced Eintracht Frankfurt 7-3 in one of the greatest exhibitions of football ever seen. The young Billy Bremner was at the game and described it thus: "It was awesome; nobody could believe what they were seeing, and at the end there was this incredible indescribable buzz all around, like some unbelievably illustrious people had been allowed to come and visit, like Frank Sinatra had just sung to us personally."

Puskas played in one more European Cup Final against Benfica in 1962. Real were no longer the force of old and Benfica won 5-3 but it was still the 35 year old Puskas who scored all three Real goals. The same year he was picked to play for Spain in the World Cup Finals in Chile. The team was packed with talent. Apart from Gento, there was Luis del Sol and Luis Suarez. It made little difference, Spain won just one of their three matches and finished bottom of their qualifying group. During his time in Spain Puskas was top scorer four times in the league, as Real won six domestic trophies and three European Cups.

Puskas retired in 1966 to concentrate on coaching. He had only mediocre success until 1971 when he took the Greek Champions Panathinaikos to the European Cup Final where they lost 2-0 to Ajax. As well as Greece, he coached in Chile, Paraguay, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Egypt and Australia. It was in Australia where George Best met him. Best said of Puskas "the players he was coaching did not respect him until he put the ball down outside the area and intentionally hit the cross bar ten times in a row.” But the most poignant moment of his later days was in 1993 when he returned home to Hungary. The man who defected to flee the uprising was appointed caretaker manager of the national side during the World Cup qualifiers. The Hungarians failed to qualify but a great national hero was rehabilitated. Hungary renamed their national stadium Stadium Puskás Ferenc in his honour in 2001. The country will be plunged into mourning when the major gallops no more.