page_title: History of Hungary
section_title: The Regency
hierarchical_section_title: History of Hungary / Modern history / Interwar period (1918–1939) / The Regency
caption_attribution_description: Polski: Opis obrazu: Miklos Horthy, admirał węgierski, regent państwa. Fotografia pozowana w mundurze, zamieszczona w prasie z okazji 75-tych urodzin admirała.
context_page_description: Hungary in its modern borders roughly corresponds to the Great Hungarian Plain.
  During the Iron Age, it was at the boundary of Celtic, Illyrian and Iranian cultural spheres.
  The name "Pannonian" comes from Pannonia, a province of the Roman Empire. Only the western part of the territory of modern Hungary formed part of the ancient Roman Province of Pannonia. The
  Roman control collapsed with the Hunnic invasions of 370–410 and Pannonia was part of the Ostrogothic Kingdom during the late 5th to mid 6th century, succeeded by the Avar Khaganate.civil
  The Magyar invasion takes place during the 9th century.
  The Magyars were Christianized at the end of the 10th century, and the Christian Kingdom of Hungary was established in AD 1000,
  ruled by the Árpád dynasty for the following three centuries.
  In the high medieval period, the kingdom expanded beyond Pannonia, to the Adriatic coast. In 1241 during the reign of Béla IV, Hungary was invaded by the Mongols under Batu Khan. The outnumbered Hungarians were decisively defeated at the Battle of Mohi by the Mongol army. King Béla fled to the Holy Roman Empire and left the Hungarian population under the mercy of the Mongols.
context_section_description: Horthy appointed Count Pál Teleki as prime minister in July 1920. His government issued a numerus clausus law that limited the admission of "political insecure elements" (these were often Jews) to universities and took initial steps towards fulfilling a promise of major land reform by dividing about 3,850 km² from the largest estates into small holdings in order to quiet rural discontent. Teleki's government resigned, however, after Charles I of Austria, the former emperor of Austria and king of Hungary, attempted unsuccessfully to retake Hungary's throne in March 1921. The attempt split conservative politicians who favored a Habsburg restoration and nationalist right-wing radicals who supported the election of a native Hungarian king. Count István Bethlen, a non-affiliated right-wing member of the parliament, took advantage of this rift to form a new Party of Unity under his leadership. Horthy then appointed Bethlen prime minister. Charles died soon after he failed a second time to reclaim the throne in October 1921 and Hungary remained a kingdom without a king. (For more detail on Charles's attempts to retake the throne, see Charles IV of Hungary's conflict with Miklós Horthy.)
  As prime minister, Bethlen dominated Hungarian politics between 1921 and 1931. He fashioned a political machine by amending the electoral law, providing jobs in the expanding bureaucracy to his supporters, and manipulating elections in rural areas. Bethlen restored order to the country by giving the radical counter-revolutionaries payoffs and government jobs in exchange for ceasing their campaign of terror against Jews and leftists.
  In 1921, Bethlen made a deal with the Social Democrats and trade unions (called the Bethlen-Peyer Pact) to legalize their activities and free political prisoners in return for their pledge to refrain from spreading anti-Hungarian propaganda, calling political strikes, and attempting to organize the peasantry. Bethlen brought Hungary into the League of Nations in 1922 and out of international isolation by signing a treaty of friendship with Italy in 1927. Overall, Bethlen sought to pursue a strategy of strengthening the economy and building relations with stronger nations. Irredentism, the revision of the Treaty of Trianon rose to the top of Hungary's political agenda. Revision of the treaty had such a broad backing in Hungary that Bethlen used it, at least in part, to deflect criticism of his economic, social and political policies.
  The worldwide Great Depression that began in 1929 induced a drop in the standard of living and the political mood of the country shifted further towards the right. In 1932, Horthy appointed a new prime minister, Gyula Gömbös, who changed the course of Hungarian policy towards closer cooperation with Germany and started an effort to Magyarize the few remaining ethnic minorities in Hungary.
  Gömbös signed a trade agreement with Germany that helped Hungary's economy out of depression, but made Hungary dependent on the German economy for both raw materials and markets. Adolf Hitler appealed to Hungarian desires for territorial revisionism, while extreme right-wing organizations such as the Arrow Cross Party increasingly embraced extreme Nazi policies. They sought the suppression and victimization of Jews. The government passed the First Jewish Law in 1938. The law established a quota system to limit Jewish involvement in the Hungarian economy.
  In 1938, Béla Imrédy became prime minister. Imrédy's attempts to improve Hungary's diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom initially made him very unpopular in Germany and Italy. In light of Germany's Anschluss with Austria in March, he realized that he could not afford to alienate Germany and Italy for long. In the autumn of 1938, his foreign policy became very much pro-German and pro-Italian.
  Intent on amassing a base of power in Hungarian right wing politics, Imrédy began to suppress political rivals. The increasingly influential Arrow Cross Party was harassed and eventually banned by Imrédy's administration. As Imrédy drifted further to the righ
caption: Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya, Regent of Hungary.
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