Smallholder premier of Hungary's second republic, forced out by Soviet-backed communists
At the Swiss border he signed his resignation on the hood of a car, the price of getting his son back.
A smallholder politician who became the first prime minister of Hungary's second republic under Soviet occupation (1946-47). He co-founded the Smallholders' Party with Zoltán Tildy in 1930, serving as its first general secretary, and after the party's 57 per cent landslide in 1945 rose from speaker of the assembly to premier, where he tamed the pengő hyperinflation with the forint. But as Rákosi's communists used salami tactics to strip away Smallholder deputies, he was blackmailed into resigning while on holiday in Switzerland in 1947, his son held as a hostage, and went into exile in the United States. His memoir The Struggle Behind the Iron Curtain (1948) became the founding Western account of the people's democracies of Eastern Europe.
Career Timeline
- 1930–45Co-founded the Smallholders' Party and became its first general secretary
- 1944.04–10Imprisoned by the Gestapo; went underground after the Arrow Cross coup
- 1945–46Minister of reconstruction, speaker of the assembly, High National Council
- 1946–47First premier of the second republic: the forint, the Paris peace treaty
- 1947.06Forced to resign in Switzerland; exiled to the United States
- 1947–70Émigré politics; International Peasant Union and memoir