Tisza resigns

On 23 May 1917 Count István Tisza, prime minister of Hungary for four years and the strongest politician in the Hungarian half of the monarchy, resigned. He did not leave of his own free will. King Charles IV, as Emperor of Austria Charles I, demanded that he step down, because Tisza would not agree to widening the franchise in Hungary. Tisza’s government nevertheless went on running the affairs of state for another three weeks, until 15 June, when the cabinet of a new prime minister replaced it. This is why some lists give the June date, rather than the May one, as the end of his premiership.

The dispute over the franchise

Tisza had become head of the government for the second time in June 1913 (he had already been prime minister in 1903–1905). He relied on the National Party of Work, which he had founded and which held an absolute majority in parliament. It owed this majority partly to a narrow franchise based on a property qualification: only a small proportion of adult men could vote, and the electoral law gave the Hungarian nobility and the wealthy middle class an advantage over workers, peasants and the non-Magyar nationalities. Tisza regarded this arrangement as a guarantee of the unity of the Hungarian state and had for years fought against the call for universal suffrage.

The war changed the mood. With millions of peasants and workers fighting at the front, it was becoming ever harder to deny them a vote. The opposition, in which Count Mihály Károlyi played an increasingly important part, demanded electoral and social reform. The young monarch, who had come to the throne on the death of Franz Joseph in November 1916, was also in favour of change. Charles wanted to present himself as a reforming ruler, and he also hoped that wider political rights would cool the growing discontent. In the spring of 1917, when tsarism fell in Russia after the February Revolution, the matter became urgent. Tisza was ready at most for limited changes. Charles’s biographer Gordon Brook-Shepherd describes his departure as the finale of a personal contest between the prime minister and the king, which Charles settled once he concluded that he could not carry out reforms with Tisza.

Wartime prime minister

In the monarchy Tisza was a symbol of the war. In July 1914 he was the only participant in the Joint Council of Ministers who for several days opposed war with Serbia, warning that it would draw Russia into the conflict. Once he gave way, however, he became one of the most determined advocates of fighting the war to the end. Through his own man, Baron István Burián, who headed the foreign ministry from January 1915, he had great influence on the monarchy’s foreign policy. He opposed territorial concessions to Italy, because he considered them a dangerous precedent with regard to Romania, which had its eyes on Transylvania. His prestige suffered badly in August 1916, when Romania invaded Transylvania and the Hungarian forces were unable to stop it on their own.

The death of Franz Joseph deprived him of his most important protector. Tisza still managed to persuade Charles to hold a swift coronation in Budapest, which took place on 30 December 1916. The coronation oath bound the new king to the Hungarian constitution and made it harder for him to reshape the monarchy. In January 1917 he answered President Wilson in parliament that it was the Entente’s terms that stood in the way of peace, and that nowhere did nations have such good conditions for development as in the Habsburg monarchy. For the Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians and Serbs of Hungary he embodied the policy of Magyarisation, and for the Hungarian left he stood for the war and the old order. According to Hungarian sources, the young revolutionary of Polish descent Ilona Duczyńska was preparing an attempt on his life in the spring of 1917 and gave it up only on hearing of his resignation.

What came next

The prime minister’s resignation did not mean the end of Tisza’s power. His party still had a majority in parliament and could block any reform. Count Gyula Andrássy was expected to succeed him, but on 8 June Charles unexpectedly entrusted the task of forming a government to the 36-year-old Count Móric Esterházy. His cabinet, which included opposition politicians, took office on 15 June, but in the face of the resistance of the parliamentary majority it lasted only until August. Electoral reform stalled for good.

Tisza himself did something unusual for a former head of government: in June 1917 he went to the Italian front as a colonel, where he commanded the Debrecen 2nd Honvéd Hussar Regiment. He returned to politics in 1918. On 31 October 1918, the day the Aster Revolution broke out, armed soldiers shot him dead in his Budapest villa.