Sándor Wekerle

Sandor Wekerle (Portrait of Gyula Benczúr , 1911)

Sándor Wekerle [ ˈʃaːndor ˈvɛkɛrlɛ ] (German also Alexander Wekerle ; born November 14, 1848 in Mór , Kingdom of Hungary ; † August 16, 1921 in Budapest ) was a Hungarian politician and the first non-aristocratic prime minister of his country. His first term of office lasted from 1892 to 1895, the second from 1906 to 1910. In 1917 he was again Prime Minister for a year, he lost the office in the autumn of 1918 in the course of the aster revolution .

Life

Alexander Wekerle came from a Danube Swabian family, but they were already bilingual (Hungarian and German). He attended high school in Stuhlweissenburg . From 1867 he studied law in Budapest. Wekerle was particularly interested in questions of finance and economics. Since 1877 he worked as a lecturer and also held various positions in the state administration. In 1886 he became State Secretary in the Ministry of Finance. The following year he won a seat in the Hungarian Diet for the Liberal Party in the Nagybánya constituency ( Baia Mare in Romanian ) in Transylvania . In 1889 Wekerle became Minister of Finance. He refused the elevation to the nobility that he had been asked to do several times throughout his life.

Wekerle's first two terms as Prime Minister coincided with an economic boom for Hungary . Industrialization made great strides and Wekerle played an important role in the development of his country and especially the capital Budapest. He had traffic routes built, including the Budapest subway and several bridges over the Danube.

During Wekerle's first term in office, the Jewish religion was finally legally equated with the Christian denominations. However, he did not grant the non-Hungarian nationalities any autonomy rights. He was also against a strengthening of workers' rights in Hungary, because he saw the economic upswing endangered.

The district Wekerle-telep , a garden city in the southeast of Budapest, is named after Wekerle .

literature

• Géza Andreas von Geyr: Sándor Wekerle. 1848-1921. The political biography of a Hungarian statesman of the Danube Monarchy (= Southeast European works. 91). Munich 1993, ISBN 3-486-56037-9 .

Web links

Commons : Sándor Wekerle  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Biography on Austrian commander (English)