CÁLCULO ESTÁTICO DE LOS PERNOS DE LA COLUMNA CON LA

Introduction

Elections are yardsticks by which the regimes that emerge from them can be measured. They can be used to provide governments with authority and legitimacy, and they help define the government and opposition parties. The Hungarian parliamentary elections o f 1922 are a case in point. Bethlen's victory in these elections marked another stage in the development o f the Unified Party. It also helped define the nature o f the opposition he would encounter in the next parliament and beyond.

To fully understand the 1922 elections we need to break the electoral process into its component elements. Therefore this chapter will begin by outlining the need for a re-examination o f these elections. It will then proceed to consider how Bethlen

prepared for electoral victory. It will analyse how the electoral franchise was

constructed and operated, and go on to discuss whether the electoral outcome was determined by the methods o f voting involved. This article will also discuss the way the popularity and organizational strengths o f both the Unified Party and the opposition parties contributed to their respective success or failure, while also considering to what extent corruption and abuse played a part in influencing the electoral process. Finally there will be a consideration o f how candidate-selection procedures influenced the composition o f the newly-elected parliament.

Historians’ Assessments o f the 1922 Elections

Communist historians were always unlikely to regard electoral questions as particularly important. The idea o f a popular, pre-communist government was ideologically unacceptable to historians o f this conviction. In their view, Bethlen's conservatism could only appear to have gained the support o f the nation if Bethlen

had succeeded in manipulating the electoral process. Thus their research either focused on revealing the methods o f such manipulation or simply dismissed the outcome o f these elections in a few paragraphs. Such historians regarded only the M SZD P’s role in these elections as being worthy o f detailed consideration.

Some foreign historians also followed the Marxist line. Batkay regarded the 1922 elections as simply an element o f Bethlen’s strategy for party formation. He argued that, as the government determined the extent o f the franchise and the methods o f voting; the actual ballot ‘was o f minimal significance’.’ According to this view not only the actual voting but even the role o f other parties was unworthy o f serious consideration.

Since 1990 the opportunity to fully access the archives and write without obvious ideological constraint has not resulted in a full re-evaluation o f the 1922 elections. Romsics’s biography o f Bethlen devotes only five pages to the election.^ Hubai has provided further analysis on inter-war elections contributing fresh statistical analysis but only minimal interpretation.^ There is therefore a need for a thorough re-evaluation o f these elections.

Creating a New Electoral System

In preparing for the 1922 elections Bethlen needed to accomplish three tasks. First he needed a broad-based conservative party, led by himself, with which to contest the elections. In Chapter One we saw how he secured this outcome with the creation o f the Unified Party. He also needed to ensure that the MSZDP engaged in the elections. This would help ensure that the elections would be regarded as legitimate, would enable him to claim credit for bringing the MSZDP back into mainstream politics, and would help frighten conservative voters into voting for his party as a bulwark against socialism. In the second chapter we saw how he achieved

' B atkay, Authoritarian P o litics p .54. “ R o m sic s, Istvân B eth len , pp. 177-1 8 1 .

this. His final task was to create a new electoral system which would be regarded as legitimate and would also help secure the necessary majority for his party in the next parliament.

The previous franchise used in the 1920 elections had been recommended by the League o f Nations as part of the price for accepting the overthrow in August 1919 o f the Peidl trade-union government. Passed by a decree o f the regent Horthy, the so- called ‘Friedrich franchise’ enfranchised 39.5% o f the population, introduced the universal secret ballot, and was valid for two years. It was presumed that the new parliament would pass this, or another franchise, into law.

Bethlen and large sections o f conservative opinion disliked this franchise. They regarded it as having been imposed on Hungary and therefore lacking constitutional legitimacy, and containing, (overly liberal), provisions which were blamed for having led to the disordered and faction-ridden parliament o f 1920-1922. As we have seen in chapter one, in the last weeks o f the parliament, Bethlen introduced a new franchise bill but its passing was prevented by filibustering and a lack o f broad parliamentary support. On 16 February 1922, the M Ps’ mandates expired, as did the previous franchise, but there was no new franchise on the statute books.

Bethlen needed to find a different way o f conferring constitutional legitimacy upon his franchise bill. His solution was to persuade Horthy to summon on 21 February a special constitutional committee. Three senior prelates o f the Catholic church in Hungary, the speaker o f Parliament and a retired justice minister, all declined to attend. In their absence the committee consisted o f Protestant bishops, the presidents o f the Curia, courts, land agency and royal court in Budapest, a lawyer for the crown, two further retired justice ministers, a retired state secretary, the head o f the Budapest lawyers' chamber, a university rector, and two professors. Also in attendance were Bethlen and his cabinet colleagues. Tomesànyi and Klebelsberg, as well as Horthy's cabinet secretary."*

The precise membership o f the committee is worth noting for they were clearly not willing pawns o f the government but they also in no way represented all the various social groups and viewpoints existing in the country at this time. Bethlen even sought to play down the committee’s authority by declaring it to be merely a 'public inquiry'.^

The committee's choice was among three options: to authorize the continued use o f the 1920 franchise, to authorize the use o f the 1918 electoral law which had never been applied, or to allow the government to determine a new franchise. To the surprise o f no one, it chose the final possibility by a vote o f twelve to two and gave, (in the words o f a 1935 official report to the government on the 1922 elections), a ‘free hand’ to the government.^

The committee had some legal basis for rejecting the 1920 franchise for it was clearly a temporary measure intended to be used only for two years. It had also been superseded by Law 1 o f the newly elected parliament o f 1920, which invalidated all previous legislation passed after October 1918. The committee in its conclusions used both these justifications.^

Yet the logical result o f such a decision would have been to authorize the use o f the 1918 electoral law. Unfortunately this solution, as Bethlen put it to Hohler, the British representative in Budapest, was impossible: the franchise would be too severely restricted.^ It appears that the committee was aware o f the opposition such a decision would arouse and therefore passed the responsibility on to the government. Such a willingness by the government to use legal and social arguments without accepting the pre-eminence o f either is again demonstrated by Bethlen's claim to Hohler that the Friedrich franchise also had to be abandoned because it lacked both legal authority and popular support.^ Thus the government used the committee's decision, and the veneer o f constitutional respectability which it lent, to enforce its

' Ibid.

6

O LK , 3 5 , l , c .

^ N e m e s, Iratok, ii, p .272.

M ik lo s L ojko, B ritish P o licy on H ungary, London, 1995, p .37. " Ibid.

own franchise proposals, passing them into law by a decree o f the Regent on 2 March 1922.

It seems that the government was quite simply prepared to use what was necessary to achieve its objective o f forcing through the electoral law. The law itself had already been drawn up, determined, and placed before the cabinet on 24 January,

thus prejudging the decision o f the constitutional committee. Indeed, in his

explanation to the cabinet o f the need for a new electoral franchise on 24 January, the interior minister Klebelsberg was already referring to the unacceptability o f the Friedrich franchise on the grounds that it would be the most liberal in Europe and that in any case the Regent was demanding an open ballot.' ’

Even more controversial than the manner in which it was introduced were the actual contents o f the new electoral decree. Voters were required to have been Hungarian citizens for ten years and to have been continually resident in the same locality for two years, since the last census in 1920 was to be used to determine the voters’ electoral district.'^ Men had to be twenty-four years o f age and women thirty years - a discrepancy absent from the initial draft proposals, which had raised the earliest voting age for both sexes to thirty y e a r s . M e n were also required to have completed the fourth year o f basic school and women the sixth year, although this could be relaxed to the completion o f the fourth year if they had access to private personal income, had three or more children, were a widow, or had completed higher education. Men were also entitled to vote at any age if they had won the Karoly cross, (a military award), were bronze, silver or gold members o f the Vitézi R end, (an officially-sponsored veterans' organization), had completed higher education, or had been enfranchised in 1918.'^

The electoral decree also raised the number o f electoral districts from 219 to 245, removed dw arf districts with less than a thousand voters, made alterations to take

O L K , 2 7 , M t.jkv, 24 January, 1922. Ibid.

M agyarorszagi rendeletektara, 1922, p p .1 4 -1 9 . O L K , 4 6 8 , B /1 ,9 1 .

into account the new borders (Sopron, Baranya county) and reallocated a total o f six MPs to Budapest and the larger cities/^ The open ballot was restored in 195 rural districts; the secret ballot was to be used in the remaining 50 urban districts. The list voting system was to be used in Budapest and its environs, where four large districts were created electing thirty MPs. This form o f proportional representation allocated seats in these districts on the basis o f the various parties’ share o f the vote. The other 215 districts elected one candidate each by a first-past-the-post system in which, if no candidate secured more than 50% o f the votes in the initial ballot, the two strongest candidates advanced through to a second round o f voting.

Klebelsberg justified these changes on the grounds that they would not abandon the 'democratic direction' and indeed were only a 'transition' to a 'new basis' which maintained political stability and was simple enough to win legal authorization.'^ In fact, the new legislation with its differences between open and secret ballots, male and female voters and its long list o f exceptions was considerably more convoluted than the Friedrich franchise. It also did not easily win legal authorization; it was not passed into law until 1925. Even the cabinet expressed concerns, although not about the numbers enfranchised (or disenfranchised), but rather about the discrepancies between male and female voters and the return o f the open ballot. The explanations offered by the government for these changes threw little light on the reasoning behind them.

As for the male-female discrepancy, Klebelsberg began by justifying this on the grounds that women were immature and unsuitable for political influence, yet the Friedrich franchise providing the vote for women could not be completely undone.'^ When challenged on this point Klebelsberg responded that rural feeling regarded this as important. For Vass this was a misjudgement since while accepting that women had tended to vote against the old Smallholder Party in 1920 they would, he believed.

Sturm , A lm a n a ch , pp. 8 4 -9 1 .

M agyarorszagi rendeletektara, 1922, pp.14-19. O LK , 2 7 , M t.jkv, 24 January, 1922.

now vote on conservative l i n e s . T h e agricultural minister also rejected Klebelsberg’s argument. He claimed that any discrepancies between the sexes would evoke social anger [osztaly ellentétre vezetj. Bethlen however defended Klebelsberg noting that, as there were gender discrepancies in England there was no need to be more liberal in Hungary.^®

Such arguments demonstrate the lack o f consistency in the government's approach. It remains unclear whether the motive was a lack o f faith in women, pressure from the countryside, a fear o f being more liberal than England, or a cynical calculation that women were more likely to vote for opposition parties and therefore the fewer votes they had the better. The same opacity o f arguments can be found in the government's justification for the reinstatement o f the open ballot, which was defended in cabinet on the grounds that the regent demanded it, that the bureaucracy was no longer corrupt, and that party structures needed strengthening before a secret ballot could be reintroduced.^*

Analysis o f the Franchise

Historians have sharply criticized this franchise, finding the government's arguments unconvincing. For Batkay, the new electoral system was clearly a means o f putting administrative, economic, social, and physical pressure on the electorate^^, and Janos sums up the general conclusion o f most historians that Bethlen was now able to ‘fix the e l e c t i o n s I n terms o f the total numbers o f those who could now vote, their numbers had been reduced from 3,042,000 in 1920 to 2,381,598^"* and the open ballot was now unique in all o f Europe.^^

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

" B atkay, A uthoritarian P o litic s, p .6 0 . Janos, T he P olitics o f B ack w ard n ess, p .2 1 1. N e m e s, Iratok. ii, p .2 5 6 .

T he distribution o f seats also appears to have b een w eig h ted in favour o f the U n ifie d Party. C on stitu en cies in B udapest, w here the op p osition parties had strong support, had alm ost a third m ore voters then the average elsew h ere. S ee H ubai, ‘V alasztok és vâlasztâsi j o g ’, p .l 13.

There is, though, a way to see the reform in a more generous light. As Andrew Janos concedes, the pre-war electorate o f 6% had been raised to 29.5% /^ while Romsics points out that the percentage o f the adult population enfranchised was now higher in Hungary than in France (28%,), or Greece (26%), and comparable to the proportion enfranchised in Belgium, Switzerland and Italy.^^ Another sign o f the franchise’s relative generosity was that this would be the first election in which the MSZDP would obtain political representation in the parliament. Moreover, as Hubai points out, with the population becoming increasingly better educated, over time the numbers enfranchised could be expected to increase, rising in this manner to 33.8% o f the adult population by 1935.^^ Furthermore, in the initial civil-service drafts o f the franchise, the duration o f the open ballot was fixed at two elections, implying that the government saw it as only a temporary measure to aid political and social stabilization.^^

Unfortunately historians have been less open minded in their views o f the open ballot. Without engaging in a serious consideration o f the precise effect o f the open ballot, it has been condemned as a crude measure to intimidate opposition voters, as they would be unwilling to vote openly against the government for fear o f retribution. Hubai for example simply states that the open ballot brutally damaged political freedoms by allowing the administration to punish those who voted against the Unified Party.^^

There are, however, a number o f points that need to be considered. First, there is no guarantee that in secret ballot elections the administration cannot expose opposition voters to government retribution. Any bureaucracy has opportunities to discover and reveal information about the electorate. Responsibility for free and fair elections lies as much with those who oversee the electoral process as it does with the particular electoral system itself. In America, for example, the use o f the secret ballot

Janos, T he P olitics o f B ack w ard n ess, p .2 1 1.

R o m sics, M agyarorszag a X X .szazad b an , p p .2 2 2 -2 2 3 .

H ubai, ‘A szocialdem okrata part részv étele a v â la sztâ so k o n ’, p. 122. O L K , 4 6 8 , B / 1 ,9 1 .

was unable to prevent electoral corruption which was still occurring in cities like Chicago as late as 1964.^’ The American historian J. Kousser even argues that the secret ballot, by necessity requiring an ability to read and comprehend the ballot paper, actually discriminates against illiterate voters.^^

Secondly, in the case o f the Hungarian 1922 elections there is almost no evidence o f retribution against opposition voters. In Komarom, the foispan asked that three teachers who had supported the MSZDP should be removed from their posts, but in any case all three were known party a c t i v i s t s . T h e r e were also cases where retribution was threatened by some candidates, but it is difficult to say how influential they were. In Edelény, Baron Radvânszky threatened his workers with trouble if they refused to support him, yet he still failed to obtain the required number o f signatures to stand as a c a n d i d a t e . I n Lovasberény, the foispan reported that the victorious candidate for the party led by Karoly Rassay had warned that he would bum the