Wekerle resigns for good

On the evening of 23 October 1918 the Hungarian prime minister, Sándor Wekerle, announced the resignation of his government in the House of Representatives in Budapest. The British chronology of the war records the event under 24 October, when the news spread through the press. That is also how the day was remembered by the foreign minister, István Burián, who arrived in Budapest on the morning of 24 October and learned only from the newspapers of the stormy sitting of the previous day. The nearly seventy-year-old Wekerle was the first Hungarian prime minister from outside the nobility. He had governed in 1892–1895 and 1906–1910, and in August 1917 had taken office for the third time. In April 1918 his cabinet had resigned over a dispute about the franchise, but the king had soon entrusted him with power again. This time the resignation was final.

The government had been tottering since the beginning of October. After the Central Powers’ request for an armistice and the announcements of a reconstruction of Austria, Hungarian politicians concluded that the foundations of the 1867 Compromise were ceasing to exist. According to the British history of the Paris Peace Conference edited by Harold Temperley and published in the 1920s, Wekerle had formally resigned as early as 14 October, but withdrew his resignation the next day on condition that the imperial manifesto guaranteed the integrity of the lands of the Hungarian crown. Burián even recalled that both governments, the Austrian and the Hungarian, had resigned on 11 October and carried on in office. On 16 October, the day Emperor Karl’s manifesto was signed, Wekerle declared in the House that Hungary would henceforth be linked to Austria only by a personal union. The following day the former prime minister István Tisza admitted publicly that the war was lost. The opposition of Mihály Károlyi demanded full independence, a break with the German alliance, a separate peace and the return of Hungarian regiments home to defend the borders against the Entente armies approaching through Serbia.

The immediate cause of the government’s fall was news from the Adriatic. During the sitting of 23 October word reached parliament that the Croatian 79th Infantry Regiment had mutinied in Fiume, today’s Rijeka. Before that there had been large Yugoslav demonstrations in Zagreb. Uproar broke out in the House, the sitting was suspended and the government met to confer. Wekerle still had a majority. Only the day before, Tisza’s party had merged with his supporters. He judged, however, that men of the old system could no longer conduct the new policy. When the House reassembled in the evening, he announced his resignation and said he would propose to the king a government including all the parties of the House, and perhaps also forces outside parliament. This meant above all the Social Democrats, who under the narrow property-based franchise did not hold a single seat in the House. It was also the last sitting of the parliament of the old monarchy.

Charles IV, as the emperor was styled as King of Hungary, was then at Gödöllő near Budapest. The search for a successor took several days. The candidates offered the premiership found no backing among the parties, and Károlyi refused to work with men of the old system. On 24 October, after arriving in Budapest, Burián, a confidant of Tisza, stepped down. The left began forming the Hungarian National Council, which according to the Hungarian National Archives constituted itself on the evening of 25 October under Károlyi’s chairmanship and proclaimed itself a kind of opposition government. Wekerle’s cabinet remained in office for another week. On 29 October the king, through his plenipotentiary Archduke Joseph August, entrusted Count János Hadik with forming a government, but his government was swept away after a few hours by the revolution in Budapest. Wekerle withdrew from front-line politics. He died in 1921.