Tanulmányok Budapest Múltjából 25. (1996)

TANULMÁNYOK - Sipos András: Vázsonyi Vilmos és a budapesti várospolitika 1894-1906 219-247

ANDRÁS SIPOS VILMOS VÁZSONYI AND MUNICIPAL POLITICS OF BUDAPEST 1894-1906 SUMMARY Vilmos Vázsonyi, a young Jewish lawyer, became one of the most prominent persons in Budapest municipal politics of the period. It was a time when the development of the city put on the agenda a great shift in the character of city administration: the transition from mainly responsive and regulatory administration to a service-oriented one committed to social intervention. Vázsonyi was one of the first Hungarian politicians whose attitude and thinking was shaped by the circumstances of a modem, dynamic large city, and the first to come into the limelight of national politics through the popularity and reputation he established in city politics. His priority was the ideal of creating a broad, conscious bourgeois middle-class that was economically well established and uniform in its value system. According to his concept the new type of municipal policy was also an important device for social integration but he considered it necessary to link it to the elimination of the narrowly elitist structure of municipal representation. The City Assembly was dominated by an overwhelming preponderance of the great bourgeoisie, and reflective of this position was a partition into district clubs. In the late 1890s, Vázsonyi founded the first Municipal Party, which was not organized according to district boundaries but bound together by its political platform. The essay deals with the symptoms of the crisis in municipal politics around the turn of the century, which was closely linked with the slow pace of transition to an interventionists and service oriented administration. Vázsonyi played a decisive role in these events and became leader of the Party. The Party dissolved quite soon, and the political structure remained rigidly unchanged. However, even under these circumstances Bárczy was able to implement the considerable extension of municipal social services for the benefit of public. 247