Three Kinds of Religion in Hungary Lessons of Three By-elections in Local Political Context

There has been a long tradition in the history of Hungarian intellectuals that dates as far back as the 1930s. It became well-known as the clash between the “populist” (népies) and “urbanite” (urbánus) camps as two factions of the intellectual classes or status groups. However, the author’s historical investigations show that this clash originated during the first reform period of Hungarian history (1830-1848), when the “Centralists” under the leadership of József Eötvös confronted the “Municipalists” whose leading figure was Lajos Kossuth. The former group represented the Western Europe oriented faction, who heavily called into question the county system, while the members of the latter group warranted it as the bulwark of the Hungarian constitution. The conflict was renewed between the two world wars as “westernizing” urbanites opposed the “Magyar”-oriented populists. Also, after the regime change in the 1990s, this old clash posited itself politically first as the strife between the Hungarian Democratic Forum and the Free Democrats and later on it got the form of a European-oriented Leftist-Liberal wing facing the moderate Right. The desperate struggle between the two political wings appeared at the local level as well. The author describes a paradigmatic case of the overall contradiction in a case study. During the local elections in a Hungarian village the post-communist mayor was forced to run against a traditionally religious mayor, while the entire village population, including civil society, followed the desperate clash up to an unserviceable stage. At this point, a third mayor candidate stepped in competing with both former enemies and won the exceptional election. The new mayor transcended both the post-communist era and the oppositional mayor of traditional religious background, for as the great-grand child of a landowner in the period preceding the Second World War who was persecuted in the Communist era; this mayor restituted the continuity with the ancient landowner class. And at the same time, while jettisoning the old-fashioned religion, she exhibited a certain attachment to a new type, as it were, a postmodern religiosity.