Man who would be Blair
By Christopher Condon
Published: April 17 2006 03:00 | Last updated: April 17 2006 09:01
A week ago yesterday, Ferenc Gyurcsany, the man who would be Hungary's Tony Blair, led his socialist-liberal coalition to victory in the first round of parliamentary elections. He is poised to finish the job this Sunday and become Hungary's first post-communist prime minister to win re-election.

 

It was, however, only his second most impressive triumph in the past two years. The more surprising win came in August 2004 when he was named prime minister.

A battle had been brewing all that year within the Socialist party between the young party activists, led by Mr Gyurcsany, and the aging leadership. The old-style Socialists felt it still had a firm grip in spite of the party's fading popularity. Laszlo Kovacs, then party president, privately assured: "Ferenc Gyurcsany will never be prime minister."

 

When the old guard moved to replace Peter Medgyessy, the stumbling prime minister, with a loyal insider, Mr Gyurcsany, in a dramatic coup, challenged for the post, forced an extraordinary congress and won support from the rank-and-file. It was, according to many close to him, a moment Mr Gyurcsany had prepared for all his adult life.

 

Born in Papa, western Hungary in 1961, Mr Gyurcsany joined the communist party's youth league as a student. After a masters degree in economics in 1990 just as the party collapsed, he went into business, forming an investment holding company that bought, restructured and sold small state-owned companies. His friends claim he was brilliant at business. His critics say he exploited communist-era connections to secure cheap privatisation deals.

 

This explains partly why Mr Gyurcsany is loathed by some Hungarians. Communist roots are one thing but the ability of former communists to make fortunes in the 1990s stirs deep resentment. Another target is his marriage to Klara Dobrev, the granddaughter of one of Hungary's more infamous Stalinist-era communists. The couple and their children live in a villa given in part to Ms Dobrev's grandfather decades ago. It serves as a powerful symbol that, for some, ties Mr Gyurcsany closer to the communist era.

 

Even as Mr Gyurcsany became one of Hungary's richest men, he pined for a return to politics. He was attracted to the liberal wing of the Socialists.

Attila Agh, a professor at Budapest's University of Economics and a long-time mentor to Mr Gyurcsany, says: "He was preparing himself for a political career as if he were enrolled in a university course."

In the mid 1990s he discovered The Third Way, by Anthony Giddens, the ideological manifesto for Britain's New Labour - one that claims to embrace both market competition and social justice.

 

Mr Gyurcsany paid to have it published in Hungarian. He also joined the Policy Network, the think-tank founded by Peter Mandelson, another New Labour architect. He was eventually appointed the group's "sherpa", or country representative, for Hungary. For an ambitious political climber, New Labour offered a recipe for the radical rebranding of a clunky leftwing party. Nigel Thorpe, a former British ambassador who has known Mr Gyurcsany since his sherpa days, says Mr Gyurcsany takes the ideology as seriously as the public relations.

"He understood quite a long time ago that to survive, the Socialist party had to reinvent itself . . . refreshing it in the 21st century model created by Blair and Mandelson," he says. "And from my experience, he does believe in it."

Still, Mr Gyurcsany has proved willing to sacrifice ideology for electability. In his 1½ years in office Mr Gyurcsany did nothing to rein in Hungary's mounting budget deficit, which has worried investors and undermined the stability of the currency.

With a new four-year mandate, however, his advisers insist he will take a new tack that includes radical reforms for health care and education. But he will also, they say, continue to spend heavily, particularly in education and infrastructure.

His biggest problem may be his own party. "Hungary's Socialist party is a very different animal than the British Labour party," says Gyorgy Schopflin, an MEP for the conservative Fidesz party who lived in Britain for more than 40 years. "Support for reform is much smaller than what Blair had when he changed Labour."

Mr Gyurcsany has long prepared himself for his job. It remains to be seen whether his party is, even now, prepared for him.