Those of you who are in the habit of checking Hungarian news sites might have noticed today that practically all newspapers and more important internet news sites carried lengthy articles about Miklós Horthy, the governor of Hungary between 1920 and 1944. Also today, far-right organizations marched, white horse and all, between Szent Gellért Square and the parliament building. The occasion was the 100th anniversary of Horthy’s elevation to his post as governor on March 1, 1920.
Here I will assess the coverage of the three nationally distributed daily newspapers.
Ignác Romsics, who is considered to be a moderate conservative historian, published a short piece in Népszava where those who are interested can read about the internal and foreign support Horthy received prior to his election. In addition, he devotes a couple of paragraphs to the governor’s relationship with King Károly IV, to whom he swore allegiance and whom he ultimately abandoned. Someone who has limited knowledge of the period will not learn much from this short newspaper article, but a couple of remarks about Horthy’s political ambitions should nonetheless be of interest to the uninitiated. One often reads about the selfless governor who, at the depth of national despair, somewhat reluctantly took over the responsibilities of head of state. The truth was that Horthy, with the help of his officers, campaigned for the job. He didn’t want to be a king because he knew that because of his religious affiliation—he was a member of the Hungarian Reformed Church—he would never receive the blessing of the Catholic Church.
As for the assessment of Horthy’s role in the era named after him, Romsics points out the controversial part he played in the 1919-1921 period, his signing of the Jewish laws after 1938, and his passivity after the German occupation of Hungary in 1944. All of these actions, or lack thereof, divide public opinion to this day. Viktor Orbán called him “an outstanding statesman,” while the opposition thinks that “the role of Horthy cannot be the subject of debate; it can only be met with condemnation.”
Romsics takes a middle position, siding with John Lukács, an outstanding conservative American-Hungarian historian, who in a 2005 lecture stated that Horthy was not a dictator but a committed conservative who adhered to and upheld the constitutional order. Horthy’s “intellectual and political judgment was less worthy of acclaim,” however, and “his lack of statesmanship was repeatedly manifest…. He did not have the strength, power or ability to free the country from the final bond of Hitler’s alliance, nor to end the civil war in Hungarian spirits and souls.”
The government’s flagship daily, Magyar Nemzet, published Prof. Dr. László Gulyás’s article on the election of Horthy. His interpretation of the months leading up to the March 1st election reveals a right-wing historical bias, according to which it was Mihály Károlyi’s fault that Hungary was occupied by Czechoslovak, Romanian, Serbian, and French military forces. While, according to him, “the red terror raged for 133 days,” we hear nothing about the white terror that followed. He also writes at length about Horthy’s popularity. He quotes a Smallholders politician who wrote in his memoirs that “we elected Horthy with great enthusiasm and hoped that he would follow in the footsteps of Louis Kossuth.” Gulyás claims that the question of today is how historians and the general public respond to that quotation.
Gulyás seems to be a prolific historian, writing on subjects from Edvard Beneš’s Central European concept to the foreign policy of the Horthy era (in four volumes). I read an article, however, in Magyar Idők that quoted László Gulyás as saying that “it is fitting to write Hungarian history with a Hungarian pen, Hungarian heart, and Hungarian soul.” In fact, the opposite is true. A responsible historian must work extremely hard to keep any bias in favor of his own country at bay and analyze the past as objectively as is humanly possible. Otherwise, a historian is nothing more than a nationalistic propagandist.
As for his closing sentence comparing Miklós Horthy and Lajos Kossuth, it is unfortunate from the point of view both of the contemporary enthusiastic Smallholders politician and of Gulyás, who adopted it as his own. The Hungarian parliament deposed Franz Joseph I on April 14, 1849 and declared Kossuth governor-president. On August 11 of the same year Kossuth was on his way to Turkey, never to return to Hungary. Only a blind Kossuth admirer could think that his career as governor was one worth emulating.
As for Magyar Hírlap, a lawyer, László Petrin, offered his thoughts on the governor in an opinion piece titled “Who was Horthy?” In Petrin’s eyes, Horthy was selfless man who accepted a very difficult job in one of the most taxing times in the country’s history. He was not interested in power for power’s sake, claims Petrin. For Horthy, power was only an instrument by means of which to save his country. One of his great accomplishments, according to Petrin, was the liquidation of the officer detachments and putting an end to “the so-called white terror,” even though we have plenty of evidence that Horthy approved the murders committed by his officers. The Horthy era, according to Petrin, was far superior to “the accomplishments of Horn, Medgyessy, Gyurcsány or Bajnai in all respects.” Petrin urges the historical community to begin “the objective assessment of his historical role and political activities.”
Far-right groups’ advertisement of their pro-Horthy demonstration on March 1
Petrin fretted over the expropriation of Horthy as an idol of the far right, which makes the assessment of the man ever so much more difficult. He envisaged that today’s planned demonstration by far-right groups would be countered by anti-fascist extremists. And indeed, this is exactly what happened. The number of demonstrators was small, Népszava reported, a few hundred people on the right and about the same on the left, including some Roma. Among those celebrating Horthy was Árpád Szakács, the man who started the Kulturkampf in Magyar Idők. He is a Fidesz media executive currently on leave. László Toroczkai, chairman of Our Homeland, formed from the right-wing extremists of Jobbik, in his speech claimed that anyone who attacks Horthy is falsifying history. In his opinion, “the Jewish day of reckoning is long overdue,” and he reminded people that the leaders of the Soviet Republic were Jewish. He didn’t reveal what kind of reckoning he has in mind. The anti-Semitic Hungarian Reformed minister Lóránt Hegedüs, chairman of the Miklós Horthy Association, also gave a speech in which he said that “Horthy’s social-political rehabilitation must take place and his fascist, nationalist stains must be washed away.”
No responsible historian since the late 60s and 70s has ever claimed that Horthy was a fascist, but there is no denying that he was anti-Semite and a nationalist who was responsible for thousands of deaths in 1919-1921. And in 1944, 400,000 Jewish Hungarians were sent to death camps under his watch. It is impossible to wash these stains away when assessing Horthy’s historical role.
