Gyula Horn - Administration and Party Career

Administration and Party Career

In 1954 Horn joined the Hungarian communist party, then called the Hungarian Working People's Party. In November 1956 he joined the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (MSzMP) established by János Kádár to lead the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian revolution against Soviet occupation and communist rule.

He worked in the Ministry of Finance from 1954 to 1959. He got a job in the Foreign Ministry in 1959, first as an official in the independent Soviet department. In the 1960s he was a diplomat in the Hungarian embassies in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.

In 1969 he became an official in the foreign affairs department of the MSzMP Central Committee. By 1983 he rose to the rank of department head. In 1985 he was appointed secretary of state (deputy minister) in the Foreign Ministry. In 1989 he stepped forward to become foreign minister in the country's last communist government led by Miklós Németh.

Horn was one of the leaders of the radical reformers who transformed the MSzMP into the Hungarian Socialist Party in 1989, and became its chairman in 1990. As a minister he was in charge of foreign affairs when Hungary decided to open the western border (the "Iron Curtain") to East Germans wishing to emigrate to West Germany. He is often credited with having a major part in the decision and, consequently, a role in German unification. He was first elected to Parliament in 1990 and has retained a seat ever since.

Horn led the Socialists to a huge victory in the 1994 parliamentary election. The MSZP leaped from a paltry 33 seats in 1990 to 209, enough for an outright majority. However, Horn suspected he'd have trouble getting needed reforms past his own party's left wing. He also wanted to allay concerns both inside and outside Hungary of a former Communist party winning an absolute majority. With this in mind, he went into coalition with the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats, giving him a two-thirds majority.

In 1995, Horn's government enacted the "Bokros package", a major austerity program. This was a difficult decision for a social democratic party, and Horn had to expend considerable effort to get most of his party to agree to it.

Although he relinquished leadership of the party after the Socialists lost the 1998 elections to Viktor Orbán and Fidesz, he was for a long time considered to have considerable influence in the party, partly because of his personal popularity among elderly voters. In the years after 2002, he hasn't taken a very active role in politics.

Horn has received several awards for his achievements in foreign relations, among others the Charlemagne Award of the city of Aachen in 1990.

He did not, however, get the Magyar Köztársaság Érdemrendjének Polgári Tagozata prize in 2007, suggested by Ferenc Gyurcsány, as it was refused by Hungarian President László Sólyom, who explicitly stated Horn's views on the 1956 revolution as the reason.

In a recent polling survey, incumbent Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was found to be Hungary’s best premier since the political changes two decades ago. József Antall, the leader of a conservative governing coalition from 1990 to 1993, came second while Gyula Horn (1994–98) and Gordon Bajnai (2009–10) tied for third place.