Wekerle resigns

On Wednesday 17 April 1918 Sándor Wekerle’s Hungarian government resigned. The decision had already been taken the previous evening at a meeting of ministers, and in the morning, at a short session in the prime minister’s palace, the members of the cabinet signed the act of resignation. A semi-official communiqué explained that the government “does not at present have at its disposal such a range of means as it considers necessary to carry out the reform of the franchise”. This was not the first trouble for the cabinet, which the 68-year-old Wekerle had formed in August 1917. In January 1918, after the general strike in Budapest, he had had to reshuffle it.

The cause of the crisis was the dispute over the franchise. Wekerle’s government had no majority in the House of Representatives. The majority still belonged to the National Party of Work of István Tisza, who in May 1917 had lost the premiership precisely because he would not accept an extension of the vote. The bill of the minister Vilmos Vázsonyi, introduced in December 1917, was already moderate. Even so, on 10 April representatives of Tisza’s party refused to support it, fearing that it would admit too many workers and members of the national minorities to the ballot box. The government did not want to dissolve parliament, and according to the Social Democratic Népszava the king did not intend to call new elections. Vázsonyi therefore concluded that the only way out was the resignation of the whole cabinet. Contemporary newspapers also linked the decision to the appointment of István Burián, a confidant of Tisza, as foreign minister. Népszava, however, argued that this was only a symptom, not the cause, of the crisis.

The solution took several weeks. According to the Budapest press, at one point the minister of commerce, József Szterényi, was given the task of forming a government, but without success. The British chronology of the war states that on 27 April Charles IV, as the emperor was called as King of Hungary, again entrusted the premiership to Wekerle. Hungarian lists give 8 May as the date the new cabinet was formed, and the American press wrote of 10 May. The reconstructed government no longer included Vázsonyi and Count Albert Apponyi, who did not want to make further concessions to Tisza. Their places were taken by politicians close to the Party of Work, and Wekerle himself also took over the ministry of the interior.

Wekerle had already begun to move away from universal suffrage. According to Pesti Napló he said that the reform was only the starting point of his programme, and that an independent Hungarian army was more important from the national point of view. In May he agreed with Tisza that Vázsonyi’s bill would be cut down, and the House of Representatives passed the law in this more modest form in July 1918. As Hungarian historians sum it up, Tisza did not return to power in person, but his principles and policy did: for the Hungarian elite, preserving its dominance proved more important than democratising the country.