The Plan and the Failure of the Reform of the Public Administration at the Beginning of 1920s

Abstract

The system of the public administration of the Hungarian state-order formed in 1867 had been tried to be modernized several times until the First World War, but all these attempts failed. After the First World War the new governments of Horty’s system attempted that again. In 1920 the Home Secretary Gyula Ferdinándy elaborated a bill which defined who could be the members of legislative bodies of counties, cities and villages. According to the legislation effective until then one half had not been elected by a secret ballot, and the second half had been formed by “virilises”. They were the biggest tax-payers of the given municipality (county, town or village). As for the new proposal, the members had been to be elected in secret ballots and the biggest tax-payers would not have been elected automatically, but selected from all the biggest tax-payers. Only men over 24 could have universal suffrage, so women would not have been given this right (they had not had it before, either). By all of these the government aimed to crowd out the representatives of Jews and the old nobility, the “gentry”. Wealthy Jews could be members (in a small number) as a consequence of the right of “virilis”, and landed nobility for the reason of open elections. Counties managed by the gentry organized protest-actions against the bill nationwide. In their declaration they called the county a legal establishment even more important than the Parliament and themselves as the most authentic representatives of the Hungarian nation. The protest was successful, the bill was withdrawn and the Home Secretary resigned. A new legislation was created only in 1929, but even that did not change the compound of the bodies. This story shows us how strongly feudal traditions were alive until the Second World War in Hungary and that the political life of countryside, besides large towns, was kept in hand by landed nobility of medieval origin.