The Unity Party (), officially the Catholic-Protestant Farmers, Smallholders, and Civic Party or Christian Farmers, Smallholders and Civic Party (), was the ruling party of the Kingdom of Hungary from 1922 to 1944.
It was founded in early 1922, and in the same year they won an electoral landslide in the parliamentary election.Gregory Curtis Ference. Chronology of 20th-century eastern European history. Gale Research, Inc., 1994. Pp. 226. Initially, the party was conservative and agrarian but in the early 1930s its fascist faction grew to become the largest, and shortly after they established a militia.Philip Morgan. Fascism in Europe, 1919-1945. London, England, UK: Routledge, 2003. Pp. 76-77. The main leader of the fascist faction was Gyula Gömbös, who served as the prime minister from 1932 to 1936. When he came to power, the party was renamed to National Unity Party ().
Gömbös declared the party's intention to achieve "total control of the nation's social life".Philip Morgan. Fascism in Europe, 1919-1945. London, England, UK: Routledge, 2003. Pp. 76. In the 1935 Hungarian Election, Gömbös promoted the creation of a "unitary Hungarian nation with no class distinctions".F. L. Carsten. The rise of fascism. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California, USA: University of California Press, 1982. Pp. 173. The party won a huge majority of the seats of the Hungarian parliament in the Hungarian election of May 1939.Peter F. Sugar, Péter Hanák. A History of Hungary. First paperback edition. Bloomington, Indiana, USA: Indiana University Press, 1994. Pp. 341. It won 72 percent of the parliament's seats and won 49 percent of the popular vote in the election.Georgi Karasimeonov. Cleavages, parties, and voters: studies from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999. p. 70. This was a major breakthrough for the far-right in Hungary. The party promoted nationalist propaganda and some of its members sympathized with the Nazi Arrow Cross Party. In 1939, the party was renamed to the Hungarian Life Party ().
It was also called "the Government Party" since it was the governing party of the Kingdom of Hungary during the existence of the Horthy era. A faction of the most pro-Nazi members led by the party's former leader Béla Imrédy split from the party October 1940 to form the (Magyar Megújulás Pártja) that sought to explicitly "solve" the "Jewish Problem."
Electoral results National Assembly Election Votes Seats RankGovernment Leader # % ±pp # +/− 1922 623,201 38.2% 38.2 140 1st István Bethlen 1926 482,086 42.2% 4.0 21 1st István Bethlen 1931 603,576 40.0% 2.2 12 1st István Bethlen 1935 879,474 44.6% 4.6 15 1st Gyula Gömbös 1939 1,824,573 49.5% 4.9 17 1st Pál Teleki
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