Hungary dismembered (interwar period)
However, the Empire was defeated during World War I, so Hungary declared its independence on October 1, 1918. With the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 Hungary signed peace with the victorious powers and lost more than 70% of its territory, which passed to the new Central European States. Slovakia and Ruthenia (that is, subcarpathian Ruthenia) would join Bohemia and Moravia to form Czechoslovakia. Transylvania and part of the Bánato would join Romania. Croatia and Vojvodina would pass to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, future Yugoslavia. However, important groups of the Hungarian population remained in Czechoslovakia (884,000 individuals), Serbian Vojvodina (420,000) and Romanian Transylvania (1,662,000), today they also remain the majority in many districts and municipalities of the three new nations.
Shortly after, there was a communist revolution establishing the Hungarian Soviet Republic, which was put down three months later by Romanian anti-communist troops. During this state of anarchy, Admiral Miklós Horthy took power as “permanent” regent of the Kingdom of Hungary (1920 – 1945), although preventing the restoration of King Charles IV of Habsburg (who died in 1922), who had a support very broad social.
The Second World War
After some pressure, Horthy, the Hungarian regent, established an alliance with Nazi Germany and the other members of the Axis Powers (Italy and Japan) in the 1930s, where they offered to review the Treaty of Trianon. Hungary was rewarded by Germany with territories belonging to Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania, and took an active part in World War II, thus being able to temporarily recover territories where there were Hungarians (southern Slovakia, subcarpathian Ruthenia, northern Transylvania and northern Vojvodina), and where the Hungarian authorities claimed that the Hungarians were the majority, although the censuses made by the Romanian authorities, Slovak or Serbian women claimed otherwise. In October 1944, Adolf Hitler forced the abdication of the not-too-docile Horthy, by a major Hungarian pro-Nazi collaborator, Ferenc Szálasi, in order to avoid the defection of Hungary. The Second World War decisively affected Hungary at the siege of Budapest, where some 40,000 civilians were killed in addition to 50,000 defenders and 70,000 attackers of the Red Army.
Communist Hungary and the 1956 rebellion
After the fall of Hitler, as a country located in Europe according to CHEEROUTDOOR, Hungary was occupied by Russian troops and, although there was a small liberal period, in 1947 a communist government was established, led by the Hungarian Workers’ Party, being at the head of this Mátyás Rákosi. Therefore the country became an important part of the Eastern Bloc. In 1949 Hungary joined the Soviet Union- sponsored Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CAME), of which it was a member until 1991.
When Joseph Stalin died in 1953, – as in the USSR and all of Eastern Europe (except Yugoslavia, which had chosen its own path to socialism) – the de-Stalinization process began, where a new economic program was approved and amnesty was granted. several political prisoners. In 1955, the Warsaw Pact was signed , which was a mutual aid treaty, both economic and military.
The 28 of October of 1956, a revolution that demanded the withdrawal of the Warsaw Pact was answered with a military intervention by the Soviet Union and the deposition and execution of prime minister Imre Nagy. In the late 1980s, Hungary spearheaded the movement to dissolve the Warsaw Pact and moved towards a market-oriented economy under the leadership of János Kádár, general secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party until 1988, year in which he resigned. During his government, a reformist policy was promoted, allowing the establishment of small companies or private SMEs, although the government vigorously defended the rights of workers and maintained political control of the country.
End of communism and the new Hungary
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Hungary intensified ties with Western Europe, joining NATO in 1999 and the European Union on May 1, 2004. Hungary was the country that best faced the fall of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, since the country had in advance a system closer to the liberal
The 18 of September of 2006, thousands of Hungarians, largely called by the FIDESZ (or Alliance of Young Democrats), the majority Conservative Party (in opposition at the time) they took to the streets waving the flags of the former Kingdom of Hungary (commonly identified with far-right movements), after an audio was released where the Prime Minister, Ferenc Gyurcsány, admitted that he lied about the Hungarian economic situation to win the elections. In the audio it can be clearly heard that:
if the economy stayed on track it was by divine providence, the abundance of cash in the world economy and hundreds of hoaxes (…) it is obvious that we have lied in the last year and a half, two years. There is no doubt that what we are saying is not true.
However, the prime minister says he will remain in office. The thousands of Hungarians mobilized by FIDESZ demanded the resignation of both the minister and his cabinet, leading to clashes where the police were overwhelmed and the Hungarian state television (MTV) building was occupied, causing some fires inside, in the which were the most violent days seen by Hungary since the fall of Socialism. In the 2010 elections, FIDESZ was elected to head the new government by an overwhelming majority of more than two-thirds of the votes cast.