668
PARTISAN REVIEW
recent opinion polls. Foremost among the riddles is the
seeming
absence
of any coherence between the public's sympathy toward the major
political figures and the major parties. The latest opinion polls surveying
the popularity ratings of the twenty most prominent Hungarian
politicians and of the six parties in Parliament came up with the fol–
lowing results. President Arpad G5ncz rates with a high seventy-two
percent approval. However, from there on the results reveal striking in–
consistencies. The current prime minister has only a forty-six percent ap–
proval rating and ranks fifteenth down on the list. Second on the list
with close to a seventy-two percent approval rating is an opposition
party Free Democrat, yet his party gets only an eighteen percent ap–
proval rating. The third on the list with seventy-one percent approval
is
Mikl6s Nemeth, the last Communist prime minister of 1989 (since rein–
carnated as an international banker) whose party gets only seven percent
approval. Fifth on the list of twenty with sixty-eight percent approval
is
Gyula Horn, the current chairman of the successor Communist Party -
again the party receives a low rating of seven percent. The riddle goes
on: individual and party approval ratings reveal no apparent connection.
Yet, one pattern does appear. With the sole exception of President
G5ncz, there is not one politician with a high approval rating who
could be considered an intellectual. Whereas the Free Democrat Gabor
Demszky, second from the top on the public favorites list, has no
background of any extended, professional intellectual occupation, the
leader of that party, the philosopher Janos Kis, is ranked down at twelfth
from the top with fifty-two percent approval. In the precious first third
of the list, none of the seven favorites could be termed intellectuals.
But that is not the last of our series of riddles. Observing the results
of the opinion polls, if elections were held today, the party that would
come in first would be the liberal Young Democrats. Their present
rating of thirty-five percent is the highest any party achieved in the polls.
And reflecting that success, the party's leaders occupy three out of the
first seven places on the list of twenty. With them, unlike with the
others, there is a pattern. They enjoy the support of over a third of the
country, and their leaders individually take almost half of the leading
positions on the list of twenty.
What accounts for this singular prominence? And what accounts for
the singular coherence, in this case, of individual and party ratings?
Certainly not the Young Democrats' lack of an intellectual agenda nor
the absence of a political philosophy. The Young Democrats are brilliant
politicians, most of them young lawyers. They are straightforward free–
marketers with straightforward libertarian principles. They are also in–
transigent in their style: they make no concessions to nationalism or to
the contraining of personal freedoms. What makes the Young Democrats
