Hungarian foreign minister who cut the Iron Curtain, and reform prime minister
On 27 June 1989, Horn and Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Mock took bolt cutters to the barbed-wire fence on the Hungarian-Austrian border, cutting the first hole in the Iron Curtain before the cameras of the world.
A Hungarian reform-communist diplomat who became prime minister after democratization, Horn as foreign minister in June 1989 took bolt cutters to the barbed-wire border fence with Austria alongside Alois Mock, staging the iconic image of the Iron Curtain's demise. He drove the decision to open Hungary's border to East German refugees seeking passage to West Germany, a breach that helped trigger the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification. Leading the Hungarian Socialist Party to a landslide in 1994, he served as prime minister and imposed the Bokros austerity package, laying the framework for Hungary's market-economy transition. His political life embodied the contradictions of 20th-century Hungarian socialism, suspended between his service in the armed militia that crushed the 1956 revolution and his historic 1989 opening of the border.
Career Timeline
- 1954–1959Ministry of Finance official
- 1959–1969Diplomat, Foreign Ministry (Bulgaria, Yugoslavia)
- 1969–1983MSZMP Central Committee foreign affairs dept., head from 1983
- 1985–1989State Secretary, Ministry of Foreign Affairs
- 1989–1990Foreign Minister: opened Iron Curtain, signed Soviet troop withdrawal
- 1990–1994Chairman, Hungarian Socialist Party; Chair, Foreign Affairs Cttee
- 1994–1998Prime Minister: Bokros austerity package