Hungarian Socialist Party

Magyar Szocialista Párt Hungarian Socialist Party
Party leader	Tóth Bertalan
Deputy Chairman	Gábor Simon Nándor Gúr Csaba Horváth
founding	October 9, 1989 (as successor to MSZMP )
Place of foundation	Budapest , Hungary
Headquarters	Erzsébet krt. 40–42. fsz. I-1 1073 Budapest
Alignment	Social democracy
Colours)	red
Parliament seats	15/199
International connections	Socialist International (SI), Progressive Alliance
MEPs	1/21
European party	Party of European Socialists (PES)
EP Group	Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament (S&D)
Website	mszp.hu

The Hungarian Socialist Party ( Hungarian Magyar Szocialista Párt, MSZP ) is a social democratic party in Hungary .

history

The MSZP emerged after 1989 from the previous communist unity party , the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party MSZMP . Political scientists emphasize that the Socialist Party, despite its commitment to social democracy, is following a rather de-ideologized, pragmatic course. Gyula Horn was chairman of the party since 1990 . In the first free parliamentary elections in Hungary, the party was able to win around 10% of the vote and went into the opposition. In May 1994 the MSZP became the party with the strongest vote in the second free parliamentary election and achieved an absolute majority in the Hungarian parliament. Gyula Horn was commissioned by the then President Árpád Göncz to form a government. Horn formed - regardless of the absolute majority of the MSZP - a coalition between the MSZP and the liberal Association of Free Democrats SZDSZ . In 1995, as part of an austerity policy, a number of measures to reorganize the state budget were carried out, the so-called Bokros package . The Socialist Party was more faithful to orthodox neoliberalism than the country's right-wing parties: it supported rapid privatization, tuition fees, and restrictions on the welfare state .

In the parliamentary elections in May 1998, the coalition of the MSZP and the SZDSZ lost their majority and was replaced by a coalition of bourgeois forces led by the right-wing conservative Fidesz . The MSZP went into opposition . Thereupon Horn resigned in September 1998. His successor as chairman of the party was the previous Foreign Minister László Kovács , who remained in this position until 2004 and was replaced by István Hiller .

In the next election in 2002, the MSZP sent the finance minister of the former government, Horn Péter Medgyessy, as a candidate for the office of Prime Minister , who narrowly won the election. Again a coalition was formed with the SZDSZ. When it turned out that Medgyessy had worked for Hungary's communist secret service for several years , he resigned in September 2004 due to intra-coalition disputes. His successor as Prime Minister was his strategic advisor and later Minister of Sport, Ferenc Gyurcsány - at the same time one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs in the country - who was able to prevail against Medgyessy's deputy Péter Kiss by a large majority within the party . Gyurcsány was previously elected to the party committee in 2003 and president of the party organization in Győr-Moson-Sopron county in 2004. He resigned from the latter position before being sworn in as Prime Minister on October 4, 2004. At that time the MSZP was represented in the Hungarian parliament with 178 seats and was the larger of the two governing parties in the MSZP-SZDSZ government.

In the 2005 election of the president, who is elected by the Hungarian parliament, the MSZP nominated Katalin Szili , the then president of the parliament, as the candidate . Szili would have been Hungary's first female head of state. However, she was denied the support of her coalition partner, which is why László Sólyom, supported by the opposition, won the election.

The coalition of MSZP and SZDSZ was confirmed in office in the parliamentary elections in Hungary in 2006 , but after the elections a tape of Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány appeared in the media in which he admitted that he had lied to the voters. Citizens' protests that lasted for weeks followed, from which the coalition could no longer recover. Ferenc Gyurcsány took over the party chairmanship in 2007. After a lost referendum, in which 82% of the citizens voted against reforms favored by the government, the SZDSZ left the coalition, but continued to support a minority cabinet of the MSZP. Finally, in the spring of 2009, Ferenc Gyurcsány declared that he would be giving up both offices. The new prime minister was the non-party Gordon Bajnai , the new party leader was the parliamentary group leader Ildikó Lendvai . In the European elections in 2009 , the party achieved a result of 17.4 percent and 4 seats.

The MSZP, led by the top candidate Attila Mesterházy , clearly lost the 2010 Hungarian parliamentary elections . Both the poor situation of the Hungarian economy and a loss of the social democratic program are likely to have contributed to the electoral defeat: according to critics, the party had moved to the right and pursued strongly economically liberal policies, whereby the social democratic profile had been lost. The socialists were only able to achieve 19.3 percent of the vote and thus 58 seats in parliament. This makes them the opposition party with the most votes; the national conservative party Fidesz, which now forms the government, has a two-thirds majority . Mesterhazy also took over the party chairmanship after the elections. The party was further weakened in the following legislature, however, when Ferenc Gyurcsány left the party in 2011 and founded his own party, the Demokratikus Koalíció (DK) "Democratic Coalition". Former Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai also founded his own party in 2013.

In the 2014 parliamentary elections , the MSZP in the Összefogás election alliance was able to increase its share of the vote to 25.6 percent with the other social and social liberal forces, but remained in the opposition. Since the number of seats in parliament has been reduced considerably, the electoral alliance only has 38 seats despite the gains. In the 2014 European elections , the MSZP was able to get just under 11 percent of the votes and won two seats in the European Parliament . After the elections, Mesterházy resigned from the party leadership. In July 2014, József Tóbiás became chairman of the party. After only two years in office, he was replaced by Gyula Molnár in June 2016.

In the 2018 parliamentary election , the party entered into an alliance with the "Dialogue for Hungary" party . The dialogue politician Gergely Karácsony was the joint top candidate. The electoral alliance performed relatively poorly with 11.91% or 20 (15 of them for the MSZP) out of 199 seats. Gyula Molnár then resigned from the party leadership. On June 17, 2018, Tóth Bertalan was elected as the new party leader.

The MSZP became an observer party of the Socialist International in 1993; since 1996 she has been a full member of the SI.

MSZP parliamentary mandates since 1990

Well-known members of the MSZP

• Gyula Horn , Prime Minister from 1994 to 1998
• László Kovács , former party chairman from 1998 to 2004, foreign minister and later EU commissioner for tax and customs policy
• István Hiller , former party leader from 2004 to 2007
• Ferenc Gyurcsány , Prime Minister from October 2004 to April 14, 2009 and party leader from 2007 to April 2009

literature

• Andreas S. Schmidt: The Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) 1989–1994. Formation and change of a "successor party" . In: Südosteuropa-Mitteilungen , 34/1994, pp. 202–220.

Web links

• MSZP website (Hungarian)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ András Körösényi: Government and politics in Hungary , Central European University Press, 1999. pp 49f
2. ↑ Bodan Todosijević: The Hungarian Voter: Left – Right Dimension as a Clue to Policy Preferences in: International Political Science Review 2004, Ed. 25, No. 4, p. 421 (Eng.)
3. ↑ Hungarian Electoral Commission: View of Parliament ( Memento of the original from March 30, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , 2010 election results, accessed June 9, 2014 
4. ↑ Marco Schicker: A party goes on a stick. Why the MSZP belongs to the opposition in Hungary ( Memento of the original from November 3, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Pester Lloyd on February 21, 2010, accessed July 9, 2014 
5. ^ Hungarian electoral commission: The composition of the Parliament ( Memento of the original of April 13, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , 2014 election results, accessed June 9, 2014 
6. ^ Gyula Molnàr new head of Hungary's socialists . At derStandard.at , accessed on June 28, 2016