Esterházy resigns

On 19 August 1917 Count Móric Esterházy, who only two months earlier had become head of the Hungarian government, resigned. Officially he cited his health: he was suffering from severe insomnia. Behind the decision, however, lay a political defeat. The British chronology of the war from the 1920s gives 9 August as the date of his resignation, but Hungarian works agree on 19 August.

A reform that stalled

The government fell for the same reason for which it had been formed. King Charles IV had appointed the 36-year-old aristocrat to carry through an extension of the franchise. That task, however, could not be accomplished in the House of Representatives, in which an absolute majority was still held by the National Party of Work of István Tisza, dismissed in May. The Prime Minister’s programme provided for universal suffrage from the age of 21 and a secret ballot at least in some constituencies, and alongside this social reforms: benefits, protection of mothers and children, and a milder regime in the militarised workplaces. Most of these promises remained on paper. Even the approval of the statutes of agricultural workers’ trade unions came with difficulty, and the government failed to legalise the miners’ union at all.

Esterházy had two paths before him. He could come to terms with Tisza and agree to a much more modest reform, or dissolve the House and go to the polls, counting on the support of the street, where the Electoral Bloc was organising rallies for universal suffrage. According to Hungarian historians he chose neither. Calling elections in the middle of the war was in any case risky, and it is not known whether the king would have agreed to it. As late as 18 August, according to Hungarian compilations, the Prime Minister tried to save the cabinet by reshuffling it: the leader of the Democrats, Vilmos Vázsonyi, gave up the justice ministry and became minister without portfolio for electoral reform, and Count Tivadar Batthyány was to take charge of social welfare and labour. The next day, however, Esterházy decided that he could go no further.

Illness and disappointment

Esterházy’s biographers add that his illness was more a consequence than a cause of his failure: a young, inexperienced politician without a party of his own could not withstand the pressure from both sides. According to a family account, years later he told his grandson that he had lacked the will and had too much good sense. He was also weighed down by the feeling that the king, conducting secret peace talks, did not treat him as a partner.

Charles IV accepted the resignation the very next day, 20 August, and the ministers remained in office until 23 August. The new Prime Minister was to be the experienced Sándor Wekerle, who took over his predecessor’s entire cabinet. Esterházy’s short government showed that wartime Hungary would not manage an electoral reform against the will of the old parliamentary majority.