# Hungarian political crisis of 1905-1906

The Hungarian political crisis of 1905-1906 occurred between January 1905 and April 1906.

## Background
### The birth of the United nationalist opposition

The dawn of the 20th century found Hungary ensnared in the contradictions of the Dualist pact—a union that promised parity but delivered subjugation. The Liberal Party, under the iron grip of Kálmán Tisza, had for three decades governed with the cold precision of a machine, its gears oiled by suffrage laws that disenfranchised the masses and electoral districts carved to magnify the voices of the privileged. “The Liberals,” wrote the Hungarian historian Gyula Szekfű, “were not stewards of democracy but jailers of the national spirit, their power built on a scaffold of exclusion and artifice.”
By 1904, the embers of dissent had become an inferno. In the coffeehouses of Budapest, intellectuals like Oszkár Jászi decried the Liberals’ “stranglehold on liberty,” while in the villages of Transdanubia, peasants whispered the name of Lajos Kossuth as though invoking a messiah. The American historian John Lukacs captured this fervor: “Hungary in 1905 was a cauldron of aspiration—a land where the ghost of 1848 walked again, its spectral hand guiding the nation toward destiny.”
The Liberals’ economic policies, favoring agrarian elites and Austrian industrialists, had left Hungary’s middle class disenfranchised and its peasantry destitute. As Péter Hanák noted, “The Compromise’s economic clauses were not merely unfair—they were a noose around Hungary’s neck, tightening with each passing year.” By 1900, over 60% of peasants were landless, their wages stagnant at 1–2 florins a day, while the urban poor crowded into tenements like Budapest’s infamous “Iron Gate” district.

### The handkerchief vote

The "zsebkendőszavazás" ( handkerchief vote ) significantly contributed to the political atmosphere during the 1905-1906 Hungarian political crisis. This event took place on November 18, 1904, when Speaker of the House Dezső Perczel ordered an immediate vote on a proposal to restrict the rights of opposition members. Perczel signaled the vote by waving a handkerchief, leading many representatives to stand up out of curiosity, which was misinterpreted as a vote in favor of the proposal. This incident exemplified the increasing tensions within the Hungarian parliament and highlighted the aggressive tactics employed by Prime Minister István Tisza to suppress opposition
The handkerchief vote not only intensified the political conflict but also resulted in a significant schism within the Liberal Party, as many members left to form a new political entity. The opposition subsequently united into a coalition known as the "Szövetkezett ellenzék" (United Opposition). This event marked a pivotal moment in the political crisis, leading to a broader struggle for power and reform within the Hungarian government

### The opposition coalition

From this maelstrom emerged the United Opposition—a coalition as fractious as it was fervent. At its helm stood Ferenc Kossuth, whose very name summoned the echoes of his father’s revolution, and Count Albert Apponyi, the silver-tongued aristocrat who marshaled the forces of tradition against the Liberals’ secularizing zeal. Yet this alliance, as Ignác Romsics observed, “was less a brotherhood of ideals than a marriage of desperation—a fragile pact between magnates and radicals, clerics and reformers, each nursing visions of a Hungary reborn.”
The nationalist coalition’s demands were:
* Economic sovereignty, via abolition of the “Quota Law” (kvótatörvény), which allocated 70% of shared Austro-Hungarian expenditures to Austria.
* Military autonomy, via Hungarian control over the Honvéd, the national militia.
* Universal suffrage for all male citizens, a direct challenge to Liberal elitism.
Yet beneath this unity lurked tensions. The Romanian National Party, demanding cultural autonomy for Transylvania’s minorities, clashed with Magyar nationalists, while the New Party’s urban reformers viewed the Catholic People’s Party’s clericalism with suspicion. As Alice Freifeld noted, “The coalition was a mosaic of contradictions—a fragile alliance that would crumble under the weight of its own ambitions.”

## The 1905 election

When the Hungarian people cast their ballots in January 1905, they delivered a verdict that reverberated across Europe. The Liberals, those architects of Dualist orthodoxy, were routed—their parliamentary strength halved, their moral authority in tatters. The United Opposition, with the Party of Independence and '48 at its vanguard, claimed 256 of 415 seats—a triumph hailed by A.J.P. Taylor as “not merely an electoral victory, but a seismic shift in the soul of the nation.”
As a result, in Budapest, 82% of voters supported opposition candidates, with the Liberals losing all 12 urban districts. Peasants, mobilized by grassroots networks of teachers and clergy, voted overwhelmingly against Liberal candidates in counties like Bács-Bodrog and Pest. The Romanian National Party won 8 seats, its strongest showing since 1867.
Yet in the gilded halls of the Hofburg, Emperor Franz Joseph stood immovable as a mountain. “To yield to these radicals,” he wrote to Foreign Minister Agenor Gołuchowski, “would be to surrender the very essence of imperial sovereignty.” On 18 June 1905, in an act of imperial prerogative, he appointed Géza Fejérváry, a soldier of unflinching loyalty, as Prime Minister—a man who had never sought the people’s mandate, nor bowed to parliament’s will.

### Fejérváry’s regime

To solve the crisis, King Franz Joseph arbitrarily and unconstitutionally appointed his trusted Royal Bodyguard officer Géza Fejérváry as Prime Minister of Hungary. The parliament declared that the Fejérváry premiership was unconstitutional, and organized a national opposition against it. Fejérváry’s “government of bodyguards” was, in the biting words of Gábor Gyáni, “a cabinet of phantoms—a ministry conjured from the shadows of the Hofburg, answerable not to the Diet, but to the Crown alone.” Its ranks were filled with aristocrats like Interior Minister Béla Serényi, whose disdain for democracy was matched only by his devotion to the Emperor, and bureaucrats like Sándor Wekerle, a holdover from the Liberal era.
The regime’s legitimacy was further undermined by its reliance on Article 14 of the 1867 Compromise, which allowed the Crown to govern by decree in emergencies. As Robert A. Kann observed, “This was not governance—it was autocracy masquerading as constitutionalism.”

### National resistance against the monarch-imposed Fejérváry government

The Hungarian people, their patience exhausted, answered Fejérváry’s regime with a resistance as ingenious as it was unyielding.
* Tax boycotts in Transylvania, where the noble Miklós Bánffy orchestrated a campaign of fiscal defiance so effective that state revenues plummeted by 40%—a blow that left the imperial treasury gasping. “We shall not feed the hand that strangles us,” Bánffy declared, his words immortalized in the pages of Az Újság.
* Bureaucratic sabotage: Judges across Hungary adjourned courts indefinitely, refusing to legitimize Fejérváry’s decrees. In Debrecen, teachers abandoned state-mandated curricula, instructing pupils in the forbidden history of 1848.
Even postal workers joined the fray, “misplacing” imperial edicts with bureaucratic cunning.
* Media mobilization: Newspapers like Pesti Napló and Vasárnapi Újság became battlegrounds of dissent. Editor Károly Eötvös transformed Az Újság into a daily broadside against Vienna, declaring, “A free press is the people’s sword—and we shall wield it without fear.”
The resistance reached its zenith in March 1906, when railway workers in Szolnok threatened a general strike. As John Lukacs noted, “For the first time since 1848, the Crown faced not a rebellion of nobles, but a revolt of the people.”

## 1906 elections and compromise

By April 1906, the Crown—its coffers drained, its authority mocked—capitulated. The monarch should call for a new parliamentary election in 1906, but contrary to his expectations, the united opposition party (Party of Independence and '48) once again emerged victorious.
Sándor Wekerle, a moderate within the Party of Independence and '48, was summoned to form a government. The compromise preserved Dualism but hollowed its substance: Hungary gained nominal control over 30% of shared expenditures, though Vienna retained veto power. New elections in 1906 reaffirmed the opposition’s majority (247 seats), but internal fractures soon surfaced. As Oszkár Jászi commented, “The Compromise endured, but its soul had withered—a relic of a bygone era, preserved only by the inertia of empire.”
After 3 years of rule, the coalition, strained by ideological rifts, crumbled within months. Radicals like Gyula Justh demanded immediate independence, while moderates like Apponyi prioritized incremental reform.
Before the next 1910 election the Liberals, reborn as the National Party of Work under István Tisza, exploited the disarray of the Party of Independence and '48, regaining power after the 1910 elections, through alliances with conservatives and industrialists.

## Legacy

The crisis of 1905–1906 was no mere footnote, but a prologue to catastrophe. In the Crown’s refusal to bend, one discerns the arrogance that would lead to 1914; in the Diet’s defiance, the seeds of 1918. “Here,” wrote Jászi, “lay the fatal flaw of Dualism—a system that could neither accommodate nationalism nor survive its denial.”
For Hungary, the crisis was both a defeat and an awakening. Though the Crown prevailed, the nation’s spirit remained unbroken—a spirit that would rise again in the dark days of Trianon, and in the long night of occupation. As the poet Endre Ady wrote: *“We are a people forged in fire; our defeats are but the prelude to resurrection.”*