The Guardian 7 November, 2007
Hungarian communists speak
Interview with Gyula Thurmer
On November 6, Hungarian Communist Workers Party President Gyula Thurmer will be standing trial in Hungary together with the six other members of the party leadership. In an interview with Communist Party of Britain’s International Secretary John Foster Thurmer warns that the prosecution of his party’s leaders could be the thin end of the wedge for progressives across the EU.
The Hungarian party leaders are accused of describing as politically motivated a previous legal intervention in the affairs of their party which annulled the decisions of its 2005 party congress. If found guilty, they face up to two years in prison for defaming the Hungarian legal system.
While in London at the weekend to speak at the Communist University and brief British left-wingers on this latest attack on civil rights in eastern Europe, Thurmer told the Morning Star that he had been heartened by the scale of support and solidarity across Europe.
There have been demonstrations in Berlin, Prague, London, Helsinki, Minsk and Moscow. Thirty-three members of the Italian senate have signed a letter of protest, as have 22 members of the European Parliament.
Thurmer has been President of the HCWP since its foundation in 1989. At that time of the fall of the Hungarian socialist state, he was chief foreign policy adviser to the last general secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party Karoly Grosz and, previously, to Janos Kadar.
He played a key role in the difficult negotiations with the Soviet leadership in the late 1980s.
When the right wing liquidated the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party in September 1989 and reformed it as the Socialist Party, Mr Thurmer rallied the left to re-establish the Communist Party in December 1989. "They took the money and property," he comments. "We took Marx and got the best of the deal."
The Socialist Party went on to become the governing party in the new capitalist Hungary between 1994 and 1998 and it has ruled continuously since 2001. It has pursued extreme neo-liberal and pro-NATO policies, privatising industry and the public sector and sending Hungarian troops to Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Increasing popular opposition to these right-wing policies provides the backdrop to the attack on the HCWP.
Hungary today: deindustrialisation & spiralling inequality
Foreign multinationals moved in during the 1990s. They now control over 80 per cent of the value of Hungary’s industrial output, dominate the high-profit sectors and are geographically concentrated in the west of the country.
Yet 70 per cent of industrial employment depends on small and medium enterprises that are under acute pressure.
The once thriving agricultural co-operatives in the east have been decimated, along with the old industrial areas around Budapest and in the north. Unemployment is growing and wages are less than a third of those in Britain. Three million people live in acute poverty. Only one million of Hungary’s ten million population live well.
"Increasingly," says Thurmer, "people are looking back to the socialist period of Janos Kadar as the good times, with full job security and free social care and education. Now, many families are struggling simply to find the money to buy necessities."
This has made the government’s drive to privatise the remaining public assets in housing, health and education highly unpopular.
The HCWP defies intervention
In 2004, it organised the collection of the required 300,000 signatures to demand a referendum on hospital privatisation. In the resulting referendum, despite massive media support which portrayed privatisation as improving provision, the government only won by the narrowest of margins, 50,000 votes out of four million.
Opinion polls prior to the ensuing election showed support for the HCWP exceeding its previous 4 per cent, posing a critical problem for the Socialist Party, which had only a small majority over the opposition Conservative Party, the inheritor of the clerical and reactionary politics of the 1930s.
The Socialists attempted to woo the HCWP, which already has a good sprinkling of councillors and local mayors, into an alliance by promising positions in local and regional government.
When the deal was refused, the Socialists sought to engineer a split in the HCWP.
A small section of the leadership defied the majority in accepting the offered deal. When they were expelled and the decision was ratified by the subsequent party congress, legal intervention took place which annulled the decision, placed the legal status of the party in jeopardy and hamstrung its participation in the subsequent elections.
It was for the crime of describing such intervention as politically motivated and unconstitutional in terms of the rights of association under Hungarian law — only financial irregularities are actionable in voluntary organisations — that the leadership of the party now faces trial.
Thurmer sees this as part of a dangerous trend to increasingly authoritarian rule in eastern Europe as resistance rises to external big business intervention and government subservience to US foreign policy.
Under attack
"In the Czech Republic, the powerful Communist Party is under threat for leading the opposition to the siting of US interceptor missiles. Membership of its youth league was made a criminal offence in 2006 — specifically, because it calls for the social ownership of the means of production. In Hungary, the wearing of a red star or hammer and sickle badge has been a criminal offence since 1993. This is also the case in some of the Baltic states.
"All this is occurring within the boundaries of the European Union, which ostensibly defends freedom of political expression and freedom of association.
"The trial on November 6 is itself in breach of Article 61 of the Hungarian constitution which protects freedom of expression. Each erosion of freedom sets precedents for the next. This is why the trial of November 6 cannot be a matter simply for Hungarian communists."
Yet Thurmer remains optimistic. He sees the attacks on his party as strengthening the resolve of Communists and the organised working class.
"We have had to fight against adversity for 20 years and are stronger for it. It became illegal to organise politically in workplaces in 1990. Trade union membership has plummeted from 3.7 million to less than one million. Many multinationals ban trade unions altogether.
"We have had to organise in the villages and localities. A couple of years ago, organisation on this basis compelled the Japanese Suzuki plant to revoke its anti-trade union ban."
Earlier this month, several thousand students demonstrated against the imposition of university fees, while, on November 10, Hungary’s five remaining trade union centres will unite for the first time to demonstrate against hospital privatisation.
"These struggles," says Thurmer, "are very similar to the struggles going on in Britain, France and Germany.
Our movements need to stand together to defend our social and economic rights — and also our political freedom to do so."