Hungary: the Politics of Negotiated Design

Abstract

The view that the mixed Hungarian electoral system adopted in 1989 would be merely provisional was not borne out in practice.1 The new system remained intact in all its essentials. It was a distinctive system in both its genesis and its nature. First of all, it was adopted almost entirely as a result of elite negotiations outside the existing formal institutional framework. Hungarian developments constituted the purest example of post-communist ‘transition by pact’, in a process of round-table discussions inaugurated by reformist elements within the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (Magyar Szocialista Munkaspart, MSzMP). At the outset their interlocutors, disparate elements of the Opposition Round Table, lacked even the legitimacy of popular recognition. Both internal desiderata and external developments shaped a situation in which the ruling party rapidly ceased to control the reform process. Unlike Poland, where the Communist Party lost control as a result of unanticipated outcomes of its own Round Table agreement, in Hungary the aims of the negotiations were system-transforming by the start of negotiations, and the balance of power shifted to the Opposition in the course of the National Round Table itself. Media coverage was limited,2 while the core of the negotiations, gatherings of party and opposition experts, remained closed throughout the deliberative process.