POLAND / HUNGARY A hot winter in Hungary? THE last quarter of 1991 has seen an enormous build up of tension within the social and political life of Hungary. Last summer many people talked about a coming "hot autumn", but in fact not much happened in terms of class conflicts. Now it seems as if the autumn had been a period of preparation, for the government, the opposition and for labour as well. LASZLO ANDOR
T HE previous attempts by the rul-
Wing coalition to concentrate increased power in their hands led to protests by the liberal intelligentsia in the form of a Democratic Charter, which summarized how the government was threatening basic civil rights.
The Charter did not have much impact until Prime Minister József Antall sacked the president of the National Bank of Hungary, György Surányi. The reason was, as the Prime Minister explained on TV, that Surányi had signed the Charter, and no government could allow a high official to sign an opposition document. The new head of the central bank was Péter Akos Bod, the former Minister for Trade and Industry and a loyal aide of Antall, who had participated in the formulation of the economic policy of the ruling Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) since 1985.
A wonderful advertisement
The prime minister's step proved to be a wonderful advertisement for the Charter. A few weeks later it had been signed by over 4,000 people and a mass meeting had been organized in the overcrowded lobby of the Budapest council offices.
But Surányi is not the only person to be sacked recently. Two deputy state secretaries from the foreign ministry, who had held office before the coming of the present government, were replaced, lead1ng to the resignation of the foreign minister, another professional diplomat, Ferenc Somogyi.
However the mainstream of the ruling coalition have not had their fill of retaliation against those who were Communists, or who had served under the "ancien regime". Amidst the collapse of the East European economy under IMF control and the prioritization of privatization, they are wholly unable to provide better living standards. They thus need to hold up the severed heads of those alleged to be responsible for the suffering - the
Communists or "those who obstruct the systemic change."
The retaliation which is being prepared can be completely legal. The parliament has already passed an act which suspends the time lapse for those guilty of major crimes (participation in mass murder, treason or violence leading to death committed between 1945 and 1989. The promoters of the act want to put on trial some former soldiers of the AVH (the Hungarian equivalent of the KGB that existed between 1948 and 1956) and some old politicians like 83-year old György Marosan, who was a trade unionist and social democrat before 1948, played a significant role in the unification of the two workers' parties, and spent six years in the prisons of Hungary's Stalinist leader Rákosi before becoming a vice-leader of Kádár's new party and retiring in 1962.
János Dénes, an independent MP and formerly an MDF and workers council activist, announced that he wanted to see Marosán hanged as soon as possible. The chairman had to point out that the death penalty has been abolished in Hungary. The same MP has also announced that he will put forward a bill in January to declare the MSZMP (one of the successors of the Communist Party, not represented in parliament) illegal and nationalize all its property. This time the chairman had to warn him that since the MSZMP operates according to the constitution it cannot be banned.
### Shock TV debate
Another shock was provided by a televised debate between the leaders of the parliamentary fractions of the two main parties, Imre Kónya of the MDF and Iván Pétö of the opposition SZDSZ (Free Democrats). Kónya argued that Communists had to be dealt with as fascists, and massive retaliation must go on, because this was required by the nation. As evidence he showed how he could whip up 9 the blood lust of the audience, mainly
HUNGARY invited by the 12th district MDF organization, a government stronghold in Budapest. This "Kónya Horror Show" was broadcast twice, just to make sure.
Iván Pétö has recently resigned from the leadership of the fraction, because the November congress of the SZDSZ elected Péter Tölgyessy as party president. Tölgyessy is a representative of the right wing elected by those who were not satisfied with the social-liberal behaviour of the party's founders such as Pétö or former president János Kis. Tölgyessy wants the party to be more patriotic and have better relations with the Church, meaning that under his leadership the SZDSZ will try to gain popularity not by being different from but by being similar to the MDF.
Competition on the right
This leadership change is probably the beginning of a new competition for the position of the most right-wing party between the MDF and the SZDSZ. In 1990 the SZDSZ came across as the most anti-Communist and thus came close to beating the MDF. Now the latter has much stronger positions which means that the decline of the SZDSZ will continue. Their shift to the right meanwhile will lead the Socialists (former CP) to abandon their expectations of making an alliance with the Liberals.
In December, the MDF also held their congress and elected Defence Minister Lajos Für to be the party no. 2 under Antall. Für belongs to the centre of the party and his promotion may represent an attempt by the moderate groups in the party to counter-balance the far right offensive of Kónya. It is also possible that the promotion of the defence minister is a response to the war taking place in neigh10 bouring Yugoslavia.
In the parliamentary debate on the budget for 1992, Finance Minister Mihály Kup promised a significant decrease in inflation and an end to the decline in production and real wages. Heads of the National Bank forecast single digit inflation for 1993 which could result in the national currency, the forint, becoming fully convertible.
It was indeed high time to promise something. The year that has just ended brought destruction reminiscent of war time to the people of Hungary. GDP declined by 5 to 6%, with a drop of more than 10% in industrial production - a rerun of 1990. Inflation rose to nearly 40% after reaching 29-30% the previous year. The really dramatic change, however, was in unemployment, which had reached 400,000 at the end of 1991, a fourfold increase on the previous year, an increase from 2 to 8% of the workforce. There are, as always, regional differences: The north eastern region is suffering unemployment twice as high as the national average.
The sharp decline in real wages has meant the collapse of purchasing power and a crisis of the domestic market. Retail trade fell by 20% in real terms. Despite significant price cuts at the end of the year, many shops suffer from lack of buyers, especially because people on low incomes do their shopping in the black and gray markets of the underpasses and outskirts.
But the other side of the coin are govemment attempts to promote the enrichment of their potential or actual voting base. Privatization has been exposed to tremendous criticism, but it is still taking place faster here than anywhere else in the region — let alone in comparison to the "case by case" privatization seen in Britain in the 1980s. Compensation payments for nationalized property will begin soon. Some 335,000 people have submitted claims to the Compensation Office, which has to process these demands. The 1992 budget has promised 1.6 billion forints for the operation of this office, while only 1.2 billion are earmarked for employment policies.
As a response to government policy, the major trade union federations announced a two-hour warning strike for December 17. On the one hand this was a reaction to increasing pressure from the rank-and-file on the union leaders. On the other it was an answer to the government, which has refused to take collective bargaining forums seriously.
### Unions regain self-confidence
The strike is also an expression of the regained self-confidence of the major unions after the attack represented by the anti-union laws passed in July. The 1.2 million member MSZOSZ held its congress in November, and re-elected Sándor Nagy leader with 99% of the vote. Nagy
International Viewpoint #221 • February 3, 1992 th the government has been under attack by the government and the liberal media because he was a leader of the Communist youth in the 1970s, but this election has greatly increased his authority. Steelworkers, transport workers and miners, all MSZOSZ affiliated unions, represented the hard core of the December strike.
According to the first balance sheet of the strike, some 200-250,000 workers took part in the strike proper, and approximately 250-300,000 took part in rallies at the same time. Retired workers organized their own meetings to express their solidarity, and on trams and buses in the cities one could read that public transport workers agreed with the demands of the strikers and supported the MSZOSZ. After the strike Sándor Nagy announced that if the government did not change its attitude, MSZOSZ would call for a one or two day national strike at the beginning of 1992.
### Militancy of teachers
The teachers' union is undoubtedly one of the most militant. Last autumn they organized a conference of 22 indebted countries against the World Bank's education programmes. This institution had made proposals for education cuts and some privatization of the school system to the Hungarian government. As the Minister of Education acknowledged at the conference, the three main pieces of advice were: 1. To abolish state subsidies to nursery schools; 2. to abolish afternoon schooling and; 3. to cut the number of teachers. The circulation of the material produced for the conference has helped many people to understand whose government this is.
At the Left Alternative's third trade union forum several workers expressec their view that what was needed was not just a two-hour warning strike but some harder action. The audience was informed that the TV president would not allow a one hour summary of the conference to be broadcast on the grounds that it had a political content. Socialist MPs Magda Kovács and Pál Filló emphasized that the government was playing a divide and rule game with the unions, and wanted to create a union free zone in Hungary for Western capital. They are also doing their best to arouse feeling against the unemployed.
Some participants in the forum warned that fascism is not the only disaster that can be expected from Antall's government; there is also war, if they decide to seize the opportune moment in the Yugoslav crisis (there is a large Hungarian population in the Vojvodina region in the north of Yugoslavia). Unfortunately, the government cannot be overthrown i by legal means before the 1994 elections, but its political legitimacy can be undermined. This is what has to be done. *
CUBA ine loneliness of the long distance runner ARE WE approaching the zero option? Are war communism or a subsistence economy short-term inevitabilities in Cuba? And if so how did this situation come about? The Fourth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party (CCP) gave no answer to this question. Fidel Castro, however, gave his answer in passing: "We enter a very hard and difficult battle in a situation into which we have been thrown - for it is, after all, not we who have put ourselves in this situation; we are in no way guilty of everything which has happened - this excellent "joke" that has been played on us by our friends of the socialist camp, which can no longer even be called a socialist camp, but a collapsed socialist camp. "In fact, I no longer like to speak of collapse, for it seems to me that for something to collapse it has to have previously been solid... rather than collapse I prefer to speak of softening... But I would add that this softening is transient: the innocents have been badly beaten and it is necessary to begin again." JANETTE HABEL
The CCP congress adopted six resolutions and elected a profoundly changed leadership. Of the six resolutions, three concern the party itself, dealing with the statutes, the programme and the exceptional powers accorded to the central committee.
The three others deal with economic orientation, the functioning of the Organs of Popular Power (OPP) and foreign policy.
The congress ratified the existence of the single party, henceforth defined as the "party of the Cuban nation, Martist [from the name of José Marti, poet and hero of Cuban independence], Marxist and Leninist."
To overcome the contradiction between the two concepts — the party of the entire nation can only with difficulty be reconciled with the single party — two changes have been made to the former statutes: one concerns the henceforth accepted adhesion of religious believers, the other, more significant, changes the old monolithic conception and affirms the necessity of reconciling "conscious discipline with the broadest internal democracy" through "respecting the plurality of internal points of view" and accepting that minority opinions can be maintained and defended.
This relaxing of the rules was not however accompanied by rights of organiza-
HE ambiguity of the metaphor is revealing: what kind of softening is being talked about? The explanation is rather brief. In reality, Castro is paying today for his blindness towards the former self-styled socialist camp.
Certainly Cuba is not responsible for what has happened in Eastern Europe and there was not — and is not — any autonomous road for a small dependent Third World country whose development has been stunted and deformed over several decades and three quarters of whose economy is dependent on the sale of sugar. Serious analysis of tensions needed
But a serious analysis of the political and social tensions of the countries of Eastern Europe would have allowed a grasp of the risks involved in relying on the unshakable stability of economic exchanges with the "socialist camp" or on its political fidelity.
Such an assessment could have led to production and trade diversification, even if only for certain imported food products, with the aim of reducing dependence, even in a limited fashion. Because they were not undertaken sooner, these measures are being applied today under catastrophic conditions.