Moderate discovers passion - Jozsef Antall, prime minister of Hungary, talks to Nicholas Denton·
The image of Jozsef Antall with a sabre in his hand tests plausibility. A pen or piece of chalk, perhaps, would better fit his serious demeanour, didactic style and earlier career as a teacher.
But the political duellist in the prime minister revealed himself at last week's congress of the Hungarian Democratic Forum, the conservative party whose victory in the 1990 elections ended Communist rule.
' Mr Antall, facing the most daunting political struggle in his nearly three years in power, seemed to relish the fresh adversity. The prime minister's powerful oratory was all the more remarkable for his physical frailty resulting from periodic chemotherapy for cancer. The prime minister summoned up the courage to stand up to Istvan Csurka, the nationalist writer and leader of the far-right Volk-national wing of the party. It took a skilful mix of confrontation, humour and appeals for unity to keep the far right to a quarter of the seats in the powerful party presidium, the governing body elected by congress delegates. The stakes were high - Mr Antall threatened to resign if the vote did not go his way.
In the end, Mr Antall appears to have turned the tide on a far-right movement whose advance had seemed inexorable since Mr Csurka shattered Hungary's political peace last summer with a virulently nationalist and anti-Semitic manifesto. The victory of the party's moderate wing has a wider significance because Hungary, bordered by countries with large and sometimes oppressed ethnic Hungarian minorities, has been identified by foreign policy observers as a candidate for Europe's next troublespot.
Mr Antall's instinct for political survival was aroused by Mr Csurka's suggestion on the eve of the congress that the Forum would be better off without the prime minister. But the gathering also offered Mr Antall the opportunity to nudge the party back towards the political centre, in an attempt to broaden its flagging popular support in time for the 1994 elections.
Recent opinion polls put the Forum's support at a humiliating 8 per cent. This reflects the economy's contraction by nearly by a fifth over past three years. In his own defence, the prime minister speaks contemptuously of the 'demagogues and charlatans' who have capitalised on the unfocused discontent felt by the many Hungarians and east Europeans who are worse off since communism's demise.
But also driving Mr Antall has been a strongly expressed devotion to the stability and integrity of Hungary's new democracy. 'For that I have made a vow and I give my life,' Mr Antall says with a feeling that contrasts with his usually colourless style. Speaking in his cavernous office in Hungary's neo-Gothic parliament building, he promises resolve in the face of racist rhetoric and the violence which might follow: 'If after words come the acts, then while words are uttered, we must stand against words; and when acts come, we must stand against acts.
' The parliamentary opposition asks why Mr Antall did not speak out in such unequivocal terms immediately after Mr Csurka's call last summer for all true Hungarians to rise up against the conspiracy of Jews, communists, liberals, journalists and international bankers, which he claimed was smothering the country's national revival.
'When should somebody stand up? That is the question,' Mr Antall accepts. A close adviser better explains the prime minister's reluctance: 'Antall is a political animal and he knows that Csurka has 5 to 10 per cent support in the population. We don't need Csurka but we need Csurka's votes to stay in power.
' It has to be said also that Mr Antall shares many of Mr Csurka's prejudices - against journalists and communists in particular. But there are limits to his willingness to accommodate the far right. 'There is a line which one cannot step across,' says the prime minister. Indeed, whether or not Mr Antall should have acted earlier, his forceful defence of moderation last week is a rarity in the current political atmosphere in eastern Europe, where intolerant nationalism has been rising ominously.
His earlier reticence may be explained in part of the fact that a desire for political peace - within his party, his three-party coalition government and the country - has been his first priority since taking office in 1990. 'Nothing can succeed, there can be no justice, no compensation (for property expropriated by the communists), no economic growth, there can be nothing if there is no stability,' Mr Antall says.
The advantages of Mr Antall's conciliatory approach have been evident. In contrast with much of central and eastern Europe, Hungary enjoys a relatively calm political environment. And the country, with only 10m inhabitants, has attracted over Dollars 4.5bn in foreign investment since 1988, half of the total for the whole of eastern Europe.
Stability has thus come to look increasingly precious to Hungarians with the end of the 'age of illusion', as Mr Antall calls the brief euphoria that followed the end of communism. So too has Mr Antall's international stature grown - his stolid message finds foreign listeners more receptive as their expectations for the speed of change in eastern Europe become more realistic.
Mr Antall's stature is also a matter of political longevity. It says much about eastern Europe that, after just 2 1/2 years in power, he can call himself the 'doyen' of the region's leaders and its longest-serving prime minister.
If Mr Antall is one of the exceptions that proves the rule for east European politicians, then it is partly because Hungary's Communist regime was uniquely liberal at least in its later years.
Mr Antall, unlike most of his counterparts in neighbouring countries, and many of them in Hungary itself, emerged neither particularly compromised, embittered, nor deprived of access to developments in the world outside. Nor did he ever cease to consider himself European. 'It is just like patriotism - there is indeed a European identity.
' European integration is a question to which Mr Antall has given much thought. He marked his victory in the 1990 elections with a call for Hungary's eventual membership in the European Community. He has no fear that the country's entry would submerge its national identity again so soon after it had cast off the communist shroud. 'Europe is Europe in that it is made up of nations with individual identities.
' It is Mr Antall's commitment to the integration of Europe however which makes him most resentful about what he views as the west's betrayals. Hungary has felt cheated, he says. The western powers took away two-thirds of Hungary's territory and left over 3m Hungarians on the other side of the new borders in the 1920 Trianon peace treaty; they abandoned of Hungary to Soviet occupation in 1945 and again after the revolution of 1956.
And now Mr Antall feels the west does not care about eastern Europe's struggling new democracies. 'People feel that again they are being treated as residents of the last chicken pen in Europe.' Particular bitterness is reserved for the lack of western resolve, speed and co-ordination in dealing with the war that rages just over Hungary's southern border in the former Yugoslavia.
The conflict touches a Hungarian nerve because 400,000 ethnic Hungarians in the Serbian province of Vojvodina may be the next in line for ethnic cleansing; and the 2m Hungarians in Romania and 600,000 in Slovakia have also become the focus of tensions.
Mr Antall thinks that the west should involve itself in eastern Europe not just out of morality, but out of self-interest too. 'It is not by chance that both world wars broke out in this region, from Sarajevo to Danzig. The danger zone is precisely this area which is always neglected.
' It is another gloomy scenario to feed the prime minister's profound and very Hungarian pessimism. Not even after the Forum's 1990 election victory did Mr Antall rejoice, nor even after his bravura performance at the congress a week ago. 'It is not the most comfortable thing to be a Hungarian politician,' he says with a rare, weary smile.
[Financial Times]
