Count István Bethlen de Bethlen (8 October 1874 – 5 October 1946) was a Hungarian aristocrat and statesman and served as prime minister from 1921 to 1931.
Early life
The scion of an old Bethlen de Bethlen noble family from Transylvania, he was the only son of Count István Bethlen de Bethlen (1831–1881) and Countess Ilona Teleki de Szék (1849–1914). He had two elder sisters: Countess Klementine Mikes de Zabola (1871–1954) and Countess Ilona Haller de Hallerkeö (1872–1924).
Early career Bethlen was elected to the Hungarian Parliament as a liberal in 1901.Romsics, pp. 25–26. The British historian C. A. Macartney described Bethlen as "not a striking personality" as he was a poor public speaker and very reserved in his manners. However, Macartney noted that Bethlen had "all the inward assurance and the external prestige of a man whose family's prerogatives it had been for centuries to be obeyed". Bethlen was a highly intelligent, cultured and sophisticated man who fluently spoke several languages and had gone on the Grand Tour of Europe several times as a young man. Besides for his native Magyar, Bethlen was fluent in English, French, German and Romanian. As a politician, Bethlen was cunning and ruthless as though he was a bad public speaker who was unable to work a crowd, he was very persuasive in one on one meetings and he proved to be an adept player at the political game. Macartney noted that Bethlen's most salient characteristic was the absence of any "inhibitions" when it came to obtaining and keeping power as Macartney wrote that Bethlen had "...a profound cynicism which colored his every belief save one: the natural right of Hungary to rule the Danube basin through his own class". Macartney described Bethlen as being "...a conservative in the truest sense of the word" as Bethlen favored the traditional system of Hungary being ruled by aristocracy and he was not willing to accept any other system for Hungary. Bethlen was not a dogmatic conservative and was pragmatic enough to make compromises if he had to, though for him compromises were made only to conserve the existing system. The picture sometimes painted by Bethlen's admirers of him as a "Whig" who favored gradual changes to advance to universal suffrage was not based in reality as Bethlen was a "Tory" who was very much committed to upholding the existing political and social system. Bethen was an intense Hungarian nationalist and very proud of his roots in Transylvania and his own family, which had been one of the greatest of the aristocratic families in Transylvania for centuries.
Macartney described Bethlen as "profoundly undemocratic in his soul" as he was against universal suffrage and land reform as he believed that the land-owning Magyar aristocracy alone were the only people capable of governing Hungary well. When Bethlen was elected to Parliament in 1901, he reluctantly took the oath of loyalty to the King-Emperor Franz Josef, but he made it clear right from the onset of his career that he was not loyal to the House of Habsburg and would had preferred for the Kingdom of Hungary to break away from the Austrian empire. Bethlen's cynicism about humanity gave him a certain tolerance as he believed that most people were stupid, selfish, self-interested, dishonest and vicious, and thus had to be tolerated in spite of their flaws. His cynicism made him a natural opponent of any movement that promised to create a perfect world full of perfect people and he was dismissive of both communism and fascism for precisely that reason. He favored a paternalistic state which would seek to improve living standards for the rural peasantry and the urban working class, but only as a way of avoiding dissatisfaction that might cause a revolution. Bethlen disliked Jews, but he believed that Hungary needed its Jewish middle class to advance from being a backward, mostly rural country to being an advanced, urban country. He felt that as long wealthy Hungarian Jews played the same role that they had in the 19th century, namely as socially inferior supplicants to the aristocracy whose approval they desperately craved, then Jews should be tolerated as they "knew their place" in the social order, but if any Jews sought equality or superiority with the aristocracy instead of being their supplicants, he could be quite "forceful" in expressing his anger.
Later, he served as a representative of the new Hungarian government at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. In that year, the weak centrist Hungarian government collapsed and was soon replaced by the communist Hungarian Soviet Republic, under the leadership of Béla Kun. Bethlen quickly returned to Hungary to assume leadership of the anti-communist "white" government, based in Szeged, along with former Austro-Hungarian Navy Admiral Miklós Horthy. After the "white" forces had seized control of Hungary, Horthy was appointed Regent of Hungary. Bethlen again took a seat in the Hungarian Parliament and allied with the conservative factions there. In 1919, Bethlen rejected a personal union between Romania and Hungary under the King of Romania.Ignác Romsics, Social Science Monographs, 1995, István Bethlen: a great conservative statesman of Hungary, 1874-1946, p. 111
Prime Minister After the attempted return of King Charles IV to the throne of Hungary in 1921, Horthy asked Bethlen to form a strong government to eliminate the possibility of other such threats to the new country. Bethlen had always disliked the House of Habsburg and made it very clear that, though he wanted a Hungary to be a monarchy, he was against the restoration of the House of Habsburg. The politics of the Kingdom of Hungary were notable for the complete absence of the political left. The main divisions in Hungarian politics were instead between a right-wing group known as the conservatives and a more right-wing group known as the radicals. Horthy appointed Bethlen prime minister as a compromise candidate. His origins as a Calvinist from Transylvania led to the assumption that Bethlen would follow an aggressively revisionist foreign policy, which made him acceptable to the radicals while his status as a member of the great aristocratic families of Transylvania made him acceptable to the conservatives.
In practice, Bethlen governed as a conservative and his first task was to end the White Terror that started in August 1919 with the downfall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. The American historian Andrew Janos described Bethlen as using measures such as "outright bribery" to tame the radical students and officers who travelled around Hungary, torturing and killing leftists and Jews (which were seen as the same in the eyes of the radicals). The more outspoken student radicals were silenced by giving them high paying jobs in the civil service, and then by quietly transferring them to rural backwaters far from Budapest. The para-military radical groups were co-opted by giving their leaders seat in the Lower House of Parliament or else were promoted to a higher rank in the Honved (Royal Hungarian Army). Bethlen pacified the Honved by giving all servicemen substantial pay rises and pension increases as well permitting the Army to covertly violate the Treaty of Trianon, which had limited the Honved to 35, 000 men and banned the Hungarian Army from having certain types of weapons. Bethlen regarded the para-military groups as a "necessary evil" who had done much to destroy the Hungarian Communist Party by killing most of its members in Hungary, but felt that in the long run the para-military groups were a threat to Hungary as noted that the leaders of these groups were intent upon starting a war to regain the lands lost under the Treaty of Trianon. Bethlen, who had a better understanding of the balance of power than the leaders of the para-military bands, was opposed to starting a war which he knew Hungary would lose and would result in Hungary even losing more land. As distasteful it was to him, Bethlen favored acceptance of the Treaty of Trianon for the moment and instead wanted to work for restoring Hungary to prosperity and building alliances with other powers before embarking any risky foreign policy moves. Bethlen often noted that it was unacceptable to have radical junior officers in charge of foreign policy and that Hungary needed mature and responsible leaders who a better understanding of the issues. However, Horthy as Regent also served as the "Supreme War Lord" and had the military report directly to himself rather than the prime minister. On an intellectual level, Horthy was comfortable with Bethlen's leadership and his advice, which he greatly valued. But on an emotional level, Horthy tended to sympathize with the plans of the radical officers for an aggressive foreign policy and as early as 1919 had approved of a plan to invade Romania no later than 1921. Bethlen talked Horthy out of the plan to attack Romania, arguing it would cause a war Hungary would lose, and instead urged a policy of "consolidation", charging that Hungary first to rebuild the shattered economy. The prime minister's policy of attempting to co-opt the radicals by giving them government jobs, ensured that much of the officer corps and civil servants such as Miklós Kozma were radicals.
Bethlen founded the Party of National Unity. Bethlen was also able to unite the two most powerful factors in Hungarian society, the wealthy primarily-Jewish industrialists in Budapest and the old Magyar gentry in rural Hungary, into a lasting coalition. That effectively checked the rise of fascism in the country for at least a decade. Bethlen reached an accord with the labour unions, earned their support for the government and eliminated a source of domestic dissent. He lifted the ban on the Marxist Social Democrats, but only on the condition that the Social Democrats not contest any rural ridings. The Hungarian Communist Party, which had been banned in 1919, remained illegal. Bethlen ensured that the Unity Party would always win elections by the Franchise Act of 1922, which made income level the qualification for voting and holding office. Under the Franchise Act, only 29.5 of Hungarians had a sufficiently high enough income to be allowed to vote with the rest disfranchised. Furthermore, the Franchise Act replaced the secret ballot with the open ballot in rural areas, returning Hungary to the system that existed prior to the Aster Revolution of 1918. To be allowed to vote, a Hungarian had to prove they not only had a high income, but also had lived in the same area for the last six years and completed six years of schooling, a requirement that favored the well off. To be allowed to run for office, a candidate had to collect "recommendations", namely a certain number of signatures from those who were allowed to vote. The threshold for collecting the "recommendations" was much higher for opposition parties than the Unity Party. Finally, under the Franchise Act the rural areas of Hungary were given 199 seats in the Lower House of Parliament while the urban areas were given 46 seats. The limited number of men in rural areas with high incomes along with the open ballot created a Hungarian version of rotten boroughs as it was very easy to bribe the small numbers of voters in the rural ridings to vote for the Unity Party.