Popular Rights in Hungary: A Brief Overview of Ideas, Institutions and Practice from the Late 18th Century until Our Days

Abstract

The idea of the direct exercise of the people's power was raised for the first time in Hungary in the 1790s by members of the Hungarian Jacobin movement: Ignac Martinovics's draft constitution of 1793 adopted direct democratic elements of the French Montagnard Contitution (1793), but it did not become an effective law in the end. During the times of the Hungarian bourgeois transformation (1825-1848), the neo-absolutism (1849-1867) and of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (1867-1918) the idea of different popular rights were only rarely addressed on the political agenda. Thus the right to instruct and to recall parliamentary deputies - customary of nobleman's county assemblies at the time - remained a debated question (see e.g. the Kutahya draft constitution of Lajos Kossuth), although since 1848 Hungarian constitutional laws did not admit this practice. In 1903, the Hungarian Social Democratic Party included - presumably inspired by the Social Democratic Party of Germany - the direct legislation of the people manifested in their right to initiate and to throw out laws in its program. At the end of the First World War, Oszkar Jaszi, Minister of Nationalities of the Karolyi Government, intended to form a cantonal system based on the Swiss model in Hungary and to hold referendums concerning Hungarian borders but this idea was refused by the Allied Powers. It came to a territorial plebiscite only once, in December 1921, in case of the town Sopron and its surroundings, according to a special agreement between Austria and Hungary. In the socialist era the Hungarian Constitution of 1949 enabled both optional legislative referendums and the recall of parliamentary deputies, but neither of them was implemented in practice until the end of the eighties. Village meetings and public discussions on local level didn't have any real power over local authorities. The breakthrough of direct democratic institutions is a product of the political transformation of 1989. Since then there have been six national referendums on twelve questions in Hungary. The paper sums up the experience thereof and the Constitutional Court?s most important decisions on direct democratic institutions.