454
PAUL NEUBURG
has now been accepted as a fact of life, and they can
be
frank about
their conviction that it is the most efficient for getting the right man
into the right job without fuss and demagoguery. They also see it as
the surest bar
to
fascism-the explicit assumption being that free elec–
tions would
so~m
bring it on. This may be a real problem, but it may
also be just a convenient myth promulgated on the basis of prewar
experience. As far as I can judge, free elections in Hungary would
probably pr.oduce a leftwing coalition. Nevertheless the myth
is
wide–
spread among party members, and it was articulated for me by Dr.
Tibor Eles, Head of the Foreign Section of the Hungarian Journalists'
Association.
In the course of a meeting which he rather cutely turned into an
interview with himself, I asked Dr. Eles what he thought might hap–
pen in the event of multiparty elections in Hungary. He hazarded no
guess, but replied squarely that such elections were not in the best
interests of the country. The people just weren't mature enough. And
anyway, because of the lack of a democratic tradition "in Hungary
there aren't too many politicians who are experts
in
their fields and
also know how to make speeches, the way there are in Britain." This
was an amazingly frank statement of the paternal-elitist position, worthy
of a belated student of Hegel, and I was not going to ruin it by
enlightening Dr. Eles about those supremely knowledgeable politicians
,of my adopted country. I rather asked him in what way, short of
elections, oonstructive opposition could be voiced. Letters, he said,
could be written to ministries, or
to
newspapers and the radio, which
themselves did whole features exposing mismanagement, even cor–
ruption, and the Cabaret Theater went wild satirizing them. This
is true-as it wasn't in the fifties, when any such criticism from below
would have been taken as a maneuver by "the enemy"-but of course
complaining of mismanagemen't, or even satire, i's not at all the same
thing as open political opposition. I asked Dr. Eles if the latter was
still punishable, and if not what assurance there was that the police
would not on their own initiative take people away. His reply was
that the secret machinery which had ground Kadar himself and quite
a few of his present colleagues had been destroyed, together with
the spirit behind it, but that one could still be locked up on charges of
sedition for making a public speech against the government. This I
found far from reassuring. Just what amounted to a public speech,
and anyway why shouldn't a government that h:ad been wrong often
enough be opposed? Dr. EIes, however, thought that opposition came
