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.
Activities and affiliations
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
Related historical events
The 1995 stabilization and the Bokros package
After the 1994 election, the Socialist-Liberal Democratic Alliance coalition led by Horn had expanded wages and public spending to stimulate the economy. The current-account and fiscal deficits widened, and refinancing foreign debt became sharply more expensive. In early 1995 Horn moved to stabilize the economy: in March he appointed Lajos Bokros finance minister and empowered him to launch a radical program, with National Bank governor György Surányi as a close partner in its design and implementation. The so-called Bokros package included a 9 percent devaluation of the forint, a crawling-peg exchange-rate regime, an 8 percent surcharge on imports other than investment goods and energy, and sharp fiscal-spending cuts. The Constitutional Court later nullified some measures, but the remaining package, along with large privatization revenues, improved Hungary’s external and public-finance balances. The current-account deficit had reached 9.4 percent of GDP in 1994; by the end of 1996 net foreign debt had fallen by one quarter from its end-1994 level, the budget deficit had been cut to a third of its 1994 level, and public debt had declined from 86 percent to about 74 percent of GDP. The costs were substantial: real wages fell by more than 12 percent in 1995, inflation approached 30 percent, and investment contracted in both 1995 and 1996. Public discontent over austerity drove down the government’s popularity, and Bokros left office less than a year after becoming finance minister. Horn backed the unpopular stabilization while facing pressure to dilute it and coalition tensions over further public-sector reforms.