National Peasant Party (Hungary)
민족농민당 (헝가리)
A Hungarian peasant party founded in 1939 by the populist writers and peasant politicians. Land reform was its central demand, and its base lay among the poor peasants of the Great Plain in the east and provincial intellectuals. In the 1945–1948 coalition years it leaned toward the Communists, and in 1949 it was absorbed into the Communist-led People's Front and ceased activity. It revived briefly as the Petőfi Party in the 1956 revolution.
In depth
The populist writers of the March Front, an anti-fascist movement against the great-estate system, played a large part in founding the party: Gyula Illyés was among its leaders, with László Németh and István Bibó in the background. Under German occupation in May 1944 the party joined the Smallholders, the Social Democrats and the Peace Party (the underground Communists) in forming the Hungarian Front, and in the provisional government of December 1944 the key interior ministry went to Ferenc Erdei, a Peasant Party man close to the Communists. In August 1945 it had some 170,000 members, and in the November election it came fourth with 23 seats.
The party soon divided. The circle of Ferenc Erdei and József Darvas wanted alliance with the workers' parties rather than with the Smallholders, while Imre Kovács, popular with intellectuals in the capital, sought a more independent course; the chairman, Péter Veres, balanced between them. The Communists, weak in the countryside, sponsored the party, and leaders such as Erdei and Darvas were closet communists. In 1949 the party ran on the list of the Communist-led People's Front, and once the one-party state was in place it ceased activity without being formally dissolved.
During the 1956 revolution, on 31 October, the party was refounded at the Agricultural Museum in the Budapest City Park and, at László Németh's urging, renamed the Petőfi Party. Its István Bibó and Ferenc Farkas became ministers in Imre Nagy's third government, formed on 3 November, but the government fell to the Soviet attack within a day and the Kádár regime suppressed the party again. In the transition of 1989 it was refounded as the Hungarian People's Party–National Peasant Party, but it never entered Parliament and had vanished by the end of the 1990s.