Baják László Ihász István: The Hungarian National Museum History Exhibition Guide 4 - The short century of survival (1900-1990) (Budapest, 2008)

Room 16. From the Belle Epoch to the Collapse of the Monarchy (1900-1919). László Baják

hard, puritan politician, who distanced himself from vanity, free of personal ambition or the need to be popular. His uncompromising determination, coupled with his political abilities, was motivated by a sensibility greater than that of his contemporaries of the danger threatening the Monarchy. He regarded the constitutional oppositionist sentiment and the entire independence programme as empty and harmful demagogy, and held his first duty to be the destruction of the obstruction at any cost. However, his introduction of new, putsch-like House regulations to this end proved only a temporary victory. In protest, the opposition smashed up the furnishings of the parliamentary debating chamber and forced a new election. (The former Parliament Museum preserved the strange documents of the grotesque events together with a few scraps of broken furniture and the signatures of the opposition members, so proud of their deed.) The national slogans and the spectacular performance of the opposition were not without effect. For the first time in its history, the government party lost the elections and the crisis grew deeper. The king, ignoring the victors, forced the country into a government without a parliament, placing the social democrats beside him with the false promise of universal suffrage. (This is when the Social Democratic Party of Hungary, the country's first popular party, turned into a nationwide political force.) In the end, the weakened oppositional coalition could only achieve power in the long, hard political struggle by giving up the greater part of their programme for national independence. However, the schizophrenic condition foreshadowed a later defeat. The great crisis of 1905 brought to the surface the hitherto lurking fracture lines of the Monarchy. Paradoxically, the nationalistic demands of the independence party provided Hungary's minorities with a model and gave them the confidence to express their own national programmes. The question of suffrage also proved insoluble. On the basis of the severe prop-