Given the choice, the Socialist Party - like other former communist parties - has always compromised on ideology rather than cede any more power than it had to. It is a curious paradox that Gyurcsany has this reflex to thank for his newly minted party leadership. The general view held at the Socialist party congress was that neoliberal economic policies were fine so long as nothing endangered the survival of the coalition.
Ferenc Gyurcsany, the prime minister, probably knows all too well that his triumph at the weekend was more a Pyrrhic victory won by blackmail than a genuine victory won by his power of argument. A closer look shows that a prime minister seeking to tear his party away from its Kadarist post-communist moorings owes his victory to its single-party reflexes. In order to understand this, we have to take journey in time back to the Socialist Party's origins.
To be clear, even if it acquiesces, the party does not like Gyurcsany the way it likes Gyula Horn, a former Socialist PM. In the short term, it will not identify as emotionally with him as it does with Horn. An ever-younger party leadership has only succeeded in placing a superficial stamp of authority on the party. Down at the bottom of the hierarchy, the individual party branches are still stuffed with elderly people who grew up in the small-town world of the 1970s and 1980s. These people have no interest in public administration, social security and pension reforms. They do not want to hear about dire necessities or market conformity. They believe in a paternalistic welfare state, and want nothing of the new leader's neoliberal, modern, Blairite philosophy.
Within the party, at the level of the lower and mid-ranking functionaries, new modernisers who walk in from the street are not cultivated with enthusiasm. They are outraged to see that, after they have served the party for years, some rich capitalist can parachute in from nowhere and take the reins of power. This is why they rejected Miklos Nemeth, who several times sought the nomination for PM-designate, and why Peter Medgyessy, too, was unable to win over the post-Kadarist party functionaries who had chosen him to serve as prime minister.
The Socialist base has very similar views on privatisation to a foaming-at-the-mouth far-right Magyar Demokrata -reader. Your average Socialist thinks the people worked hard and spent their own money on building up the country, and now "these people are selling us out." A speech by Katalin Szili, the president of Parliament, and an article that appeared in the left-wing daily Nepszava the day before the congress - both thinly veiled attacks on Gyurcsany - in truth reflect the genuine beliefs and deepest feelings of the vast bulk of the Socialist Party's membership.
So why does the party continue to vote for Gyurcsany? For the same reason that it voted in favour of the despised Bokros Package. The Socialist Party inherited the apparatus of a dictatorial party state in 1989, in which for many years the unwritten law had been that, whenever there was a choice to be made between ideological correctness and preserving power, the latter always won out. Wherever communists took power, it emerged very quickly that purely implemented Marxism-Leninism didn't work. To quote Sandor Revesz, "the kind of Socialism that worked ideologically was unsustainable, but sustainable Socialism didn't work ideologically." The Party quickly emerged to fill this void.
From this, everything followed. The Party became a kind of collective ego, gaining ascendancy over dogma. If Stalin had announced in 1937 that he would be crowned Tsar the next day and would introduce civil democracy, his comrades would have applauded until their hands bled. If they acquiesced in the hanging of their ideologically loyal fellow members on trumped up allegations that they were spying for the imperialists, and if they accepted a pact with Hitler, then why would have balked at a coronation? This fact links the harsh early days of the communist regimes to their soft endings. The administrators of the Happiest Barrack of the 1970s condemned the threatening, nuclear-armed West while knowing full well that the system they operated was being kept on life support by Wall Street, the IMF and the World Bank.
We shouldn't think for a moment that the county first secretaries of the Kadar era hated this state of affairs any less than they hate Gyurcsany's reform package now. But they know well that this the swan-song of the great Idea. Their existence is only justified by Practice, which progressively erodes Ideology. The Left of "Kadar's People" paid the price of power by taking out loans at market rates and pumping them into the welfare state. After 1973, they sought loans to cover the costs of rising oil prices just as in 2002, when they borrowed to finance social security. The logical end to the first debt spiral came with the collapse of the regime and the Bokros Package. This latest spiral has ended with a mad fit of reform and ultimatum-like cuts. Horn presented the former as a sad necessity, Gyurcsany the latter as a virtue.
It's twofold paradox. The Socialist 'barons' were forced to accept Gyurcsany's package as the short-term price of survival, even as they knew that it would hasten the twilight of their world. They were like starving people filling their stomachs from cans of food laced with arsenic. The Socialist leader's 'poison' is globalising modernity. Gyurcsany is drawing on the inherited single-party reflex to sterilise Kadarism. It's as if the Pope were to use his infallibility to issue an encyclical denying God. It's hardly sporting, it's certainly not moral, but it is effective. A Kadarist approach to de-Kadarification.
László Tamás Papp
