Fascism in Hungary

Historical interpretation of Hungarian fascism1 has been shaped by the political divisions that followed the fall of Fascism in 1945. Almost from the moment of the war’s end, Hungary’s left-wing political parties used their anti-fascist cre- dentials to legitimise their political project for Hungary’s future. They sought to emphasise not only how they distinguished themselves from the country’s national socialist parties – especially the Arrow Cross Party (Nyilaskeresztes Párt, NP), which briefly held office during the last tragic months of the war – but also attempted to tar Hungary’s authoritarian interwar regime with the brush of fascism. From the end of the Second World War, through most of the socialist era, politics in the era of Admiral Miklós Horthy, from 1919 until 1944, was described as ‘Horthy fascism’ – its pursuit of territorial revision and insti- tutionalised anti-Semitism was held responsible for the tragedies of Hungary’s painful entanglement in the Second World War and the murder of the majority of the country’s Jewish population. Since the 1970s, and more overtly since 1989, the historiography of the interwar period has emphasised the distance between fascism and the authoritarian and conservative practice of politics during the Horthy era – based as the latter was on an oligarchic parliamentari- anism, which harked back to the political system of the dualist era as much as it looked forward to the political practices of Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany. While Hungary’s radical national socialist parties defined themselves as radical-nationalist opponents of the country’s interwar political system, it is impossible to explore Hungarian fascism without considering its relationship to the dominant conservatism of the interwar years. This is so principally because Hungarian fascist movements in the 1930s existed in a symbiotic relationship with the structures and patterns of social support for the dominant interwar regime. In many respects the national socialism that emerged during the decade was a radical variant of the conservatism to which most of Hungary’s ruling elite subscribed. The boundaries between the conservative governing elite and the radical right had been fluid from the beginnings of the

* Originally published as Mark Pittaway 2009, ‘Hungary’, in The Oxford Handbook of Fascism, edited by R.J.B. Bosworth, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 380–97. 1 Editor’s note: I have capitalised ‘Fascism’ and ‘National Socialism’ when the article refers to the Italian or German movement, party and regime. I leave the terms in lowercase when referring to the phenomena in Hungary.

Horthy era in 1919. Counter-revolutionary governments of the early 1920s had drawn considerable support from the radical right within both the military and the country as a whole. The consolidation of their political authority relied on the development of a symbiotic relationship between the aristocratic governing elite and counter-revolutionary paramilitarism. During Prime Minister István Bethlen’s period of office between 1921 and 1931, the influence of the radical right on the political system was contained, and governing practice instead resembled the authoritarian liberalism of the pre-war years. But the depression radicalised political opinion. During the early 1930s, public opinion moved sharply to the right, increasingly associating not only democratic ideas with a ‘foreign’ and ‘liberal’ spirit, but also the political practices of the Bethlen era. Explicit fascism and national socialism were the most radical manifesta- tions of this shift, and this process goes some way towards explaining some of its peculiarities in the Hungarian context. By the turn of the 1940s, national socialism had achieved a considerable popularity, resting on a cross-class coalition that stretched from army officers, public officials, small business- men, the poorer segments of the agrarian population, and even sections of the industrial working class. However, it was kept out of power at that point only by a combination of the selective use of state power against the movement, and the appeasement of anti-Semitic and irredentist opinion by governments. Its medium- and long-term fortunes were tied to the prestige and popularity of German National Socialism within Hungary. For this reason, hampered by its own political mistakes, the Hungarian far right found that the unpopularity of the Second World War led to an evaporation of support. When it finally came to power as a result of a German-backed coup in October 1944, Hungarian national socialism was considerably weaker than four years previously in terms of the backing it received. Its association with the period in late 1944 and April 1945 – when Hungary was the theatre of bloody military conflict between the Soviet Union and retreating Axis forces – and its own violence and extremism in power, left it profoundly discredited. While the early post-war years were marked by isolated acts of anti-Semitic violence, Hungary’s various post-war regimes closed off the political space into which neo-fascist organisations might have emerged. During the years of socialist dictatorship from 1948, ‘the struggle against fascism’ became a central aspect of the regime’s ideological armoury. While the re-emergence of political pluralism since 1989 has seen the appearance of some radical right-wing movements and parties, and, indeed, acts of protest, these hark back more to the broader radical right of the interwar years than solely to those movements that can be unproblematically char- acterised as fascist.