Béla Kovács

In 1926 Kovács married and began farming the eight hold his wife inherited, adding land of his own until the smallholding reached about thirty hold by 1940. He finished four years of elementary and four of burgher schooling, took agricultural courses and qualified as a waiter, keeping open a way out of farming. He did not, however, remain an ordinary peasant. In 1927, aged nineteen, he became a member of the representative body in Patacs, and from 1932 served as deputy judge in Mecsekalja. The historian István Vida described him as embodying "the type of peasant who wanted to rise and become bourgeois, who took an interest in the affairs of the world", the so-called polgárparaszt or burgher-peasant common in Baranya, a man who "did not go about in boots but mostly in shoes and trousers".

In the early 1930s he turned to national politics and joined the Independent Smallholders' Party in 1933. An ambitious and able young peasant, he climbed the party's ranks rapidly, becoming Baranya county's leading figure in 1936 and, at thirty-one in 1939, national deputy general secretary and a parliamentary candidate. From 1941 he led peasant mass organization as general secretary of the Magyar Parasztszövetség (Hungarian Peasant League). During the Second World War he took part in the anti-Nazi independence movement, and after 29 November 1944 he sat on the Pécs city administrative committee and then became a political state secretary at the Interior Ministry. The path from village office to the national party leadership and post-war state administration was thus already laid down before 1945.