Imre Pozsgay

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Imre Pozsgay (2012)

Imre Pozsgay [ ˈimrɛ ˈpoʒɡɒi ] (born November 26, 1933 in Kóny ; † March 25, 2016 in Budapest ) was a Hungarian politician .

Early political career

Imre Pozsgay began his political career in Hungary during the Stalinist Rákosi era . While studying philosophy and history, he joined the Communist Party of the Hungarian Working People in 1950 (that was the name of the state party at the time, Hungarian: MDP, renamed Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party after 1956 , Hungarian: MSZMP). As a loyal communist, he wrote an inflammatory article for the daily Petőfi Népe in 1957 , in which he defamed the Hungarian people's uprising as "vile" and denigrated it as a "counter-revolution". From 1976 to 1990 he held various ministerial offices and was a member of the Central Committee from 1980 to 1989 , and from 1988 a member of the Politburo .

Significance in the collapse of the Eastern bloc

Contrary to his earlier convictions, Pozsgay turned into one of the leading reform communists within the (still) existing one-party dictatorship in the course of the 1980s and is therefore, in retrospect, considered to be one of the pioneers of the upheaval in the former Eastern Bloc states: as early as 1988 he stood for the reorganization of Hungary on a democratic basis; In January 1989 he was the first to publicly and officially name the popular uprising of 1956 as such (unlike in his article a good 30 years earlier, see above), which meant the end of this last taboo of the regime. In May of the same year he was seen in a Spiegel article in the center of radical innovators in Hungary. Walter Mayr , long-time Russian correspondent for Spiegel, even called Pozsgay 20 years later the “driver and patron saint of all Magyar pioneers and lateral thinkers” and points out that Pozsgay was always ahead of its time. In 1968 he wrote his dissertation on the "Possibilities of Democracy in Socialism". As a member of the Central Committee, he had already warned of Hungary's “way into the debt trap” in 1981 and in 1988 described the border installations as “technically, morally, historically” obsolete. He also called the Berlin Wall in May 1989 a “shame”. Dieter Segert even put Pozsgay on a par with the two much better known politicians Jaruzelski and Gorbatschow , who are all three "heroes of retreat" for him.

Together with Otto Habsburg-Lothringen , Pozsgay was the patron of the pan-European picnic that led to the opening of the border on August 19, 1989 at the border near Sopron , which numerous GDR citizens used to flee to Austria.

After 1990 Pozsgay worked as a professor at the University of Debrecen and at the Károli Gáspár University in Budapest. In 2010 Pozsgay was awarded the Dr. Rainer Hildebrandt Medal by Alexandra Hildebrandt . Once a year, the award recognizes extraordinary, non-violent, human rights engagement.

literature

Web links

Commons : Imre Pozsgay  - collection of images, videos and audio files

swell

  1. ↑ Mort d'Imre Pozsgay, le “Gorbatchev hongrois” , online edition of Le Monde , March 30, 2016
  2. ↑ https://mandiner.hu/cikk/20131127_pozsgay_imre_forradalom_vagy_ellenforradalom_1957_december_15
  3. ↑ Riesiger Schwall , Der Spiegel, Issue 21, May 22, 1989, pp. 196-200, online
  4. ↑ a b Walter Mayr: The first stone , Der Spiegel, issue 22, May 25, 2009, pp. 114–117, online
  5. ↑ Dieter Segert: The borders of Eastern Europe, 1918, 1945, 1989: three attempts to arrive in the West , Frankfurt / M., 2002, p. 232, Google Books .
  6. ↑ Previous winners ( Memento from August 2, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) on mauermuseum.de
personal data
SURNAME Pozsgay, Imre
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian politician
DATE OF BIRTH November 26, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH Kóny
DATE OF DEATH March 25, 2016
Place of death Budapest