Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization

In Targu Mures, when the Hungarians win a majority on the town council or the Romanians vote in their candidate for mayor, half the city celebrates and the other half mopes.

In this city politics and ethnicity go hand in hand. When rioting broke out between the city's Romanians and Hungarians in March 1990, only three months after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu, long-suppressed ethnic tensions came to world attention.

The city's population splits very nearly down the middle. Even the victims of the 1990 street fights happened to be divided equally between the two communities: three Romanians, three Hungarians.

HUNGARIANS AND SZEKLERS

Targu Mures (Marosvasarhely in Hungarian) is a city of 150,000 in Transylvania, the region that most of Romania's 1.5 million ethnic Hungarians call home. This stronghold of Hungarian culture and political power in Romania has been central to the Hungarian minority's remarkable political cohesiveness throughout 14 years of post-communist history. Now that unity may be threatened by internal fractures and public rivalries.

The Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (UDMR), the parliamentary umbrella organization of the ethnic Hungarians in Romania, has a strong position in Targu Mures. Most national meetings of the UDMR are held here, and the party's leader, Bela Marko, has an office here. The UDMR controls the town and county councils, and most of the Mures county parliamentarians are UDMR members, while the votes of ethnic Romanians are shared among a number of parties. However, a new phenomenon could threaten the party's monopoly and even deprive it of its 39 seats in the Senate and Chamber of Deputies after the 28 November elections.

One potential threat from within the Hungarian ranks is headed by Kalman Kiss, one of the first UDMR dissenters to set up an alternative political organization. His Hungarian Free Democrat Party in Romania (PLDMR), founded in 1992, never presented a serious threat to the parent party, being considered by most as a diversion backed by left-of-center politicians in Bucharest to draw votes from the UDMR.

The severe restrictions on registering a political party or a minority association put the new party at a disadvantage compared with the UDMR. At the beginning of this year, Kiss then hit on the idea of founding a new minority organization, perhaps attracted by the seat in parliament to which official minorities are entitled by law.

The Szekler Union in Romania (USR) is based in Targu Mures, the major city of the so-called Szeklerland. Undaunted by the knowledge that only about 500 Romanian citizens declared themselves Szekler in the 2002 census or that “Szekler” denotes only a regional name for the area in eastern Transylvania where 800,000 ethnic Hungarians live, Kiss pushed for official recognition of the Szeklers as a separate minority.

But who are the Szeklers? Their origin is endlessly disputed, with one widely accepted hypothesis tracing their ancestors to a Turkic tribe that joined the Magyars centuries before their arrival in the Carpathian Basin. Their sense of special identity and pride stems above all from their rich, colorful dialect, still a source of renewal for the Hungarian literary language, and from their centuries-old privileged status as guardians of the Hungarian Kingdom's eastern marches. Half of today's ethnic Hungarians in Romania live in Szeklerland. They are known to defend their position as a Hungarian minority more ardently than anyone, and any attempt to present them as anything else than Hungarians is refuted with indignation by the Szeklers themselves.

With occasional exceptions. Explaining why he started the USR, Kiss declared, “The Szeklers have always had problems with the Hungarians." Marko and the many other UDMR leaders who are themselves Szeklers may not have seen his point.

Nor the authorities in Bucharest. The Szekler Union was not allowed to participate in local elections in June, and, worse, the recently amended law on parliamentary elections confirmed that only those minority organizations already represented in parliament were eligible to run candidates, thus excluding the USR from November's parliamentary elections.

POLITICAL NEWCOMERS

Although the Szekler Union hardly seems likely to challenge the UDMR any more than did its predecessor PLDMR, another Hungarian alternative may be poised to make a move.

The Hungarian Civic Union (UCM) is one of the most active new political groups to call for greater autonomy for the Hungarian minority. Originally a breakaway group within the UDMR, its members called for a more aggressive policy on autonomy than the step-by-step approach favored by Marko and his supporters. The UCM is friendly toward the right-wing Fidesz, Hungary's leading opposition party and originator of the controversial "Status Law" granting educational and other support to Hungarian minorities in the countries neighboring Hungary.

Unlike other new groups discontented with Marko's policy of gradual progress toward key aims such as greater language rights, greater political autonomy, and the re-opening of the Hungarian-language state university based in Cluj, the UCM intends to become a full-fledged political movement. Frustrated by the amended elections law, its hopes to run a party list of candidates in June's local elections were dashed, so its members were restricted to running as independents or as “guest candidates” parachuted into other party lists, with little success: no mandates in Targu Mures or elsewhere. UCM president Jeno Szasz was one of the few party members to gain or retain local office when he was re-elected mayor of Odorheiul Secuiesc as an independent.

The new party initially sought to run its candidates on the UDMR's lists this November, but when UDMR rejected high-level cooperation with the UCM, Szasz announced that his party's candidates would appear on the electoral lists of the Popular Action party or the Truth and Justice Alliance, Romania’s biggest opposition force. The conservative Christian-oriented Popular Action welcomed the idea, while Truth and Justice leaders have neither accepted nor rejected the arrangement, not wanting to exclude a possible coalition with the UDMR in the event of being asked to form a government.

The Hungarian Civic Union further distanced itself from the UDMR in early October when it began a petition drive to gather the 25,000 signatures required to run as a political party in its own right. The UDMR responded by releasing a national survey of ethnic Hungarian voters in which four of five respondents indicated they would vote for UDMR candidates in the upcoming elections. Union officials delivered more than 26,000 signatures to elections officials on 21 October.

A MONOPOLY UNDER THREAT

Even if the UCM fails to win a single seat in parliament, however, it could vitally affect the ethnic-Hungarian vote, perhaps even indirectly block any Hungarian candidates from being elected if voters dissatisfied with the UDMR's monopoly on power stay away from the polls.
And that is just what some observers argue they may do, discouraged by the lack of choice in heavily Hungarian, in other words UDMR-dominated, districts. In the Szeklerland county of Harghita east of Targu Mures, for instance, 85 percent of the population considers itself Hungarian, and all of the county's two senators and five lower-chamber deputies are UDMR members. The same holds for three-quarters Hungarian Covasna county, which returns two UDMR senators and three deputies.

Until now, the roughly 7 percent of Romanians who speak Hungarian as a mother tongue have voted for UDMR candidates in numbers sufficient to ensure 6 percent to 8 percent of parliamentary seats for the party. Even though the UDMR has heightened its campaign rhetoric on autonomy and even said it would accept UCM candidates willing to change party membership, fewer votes nationwide--due to voter apathy and a falling population base as local Hungarians emigrate to the home country or farther west--could see the party failing to win a single seat. Thus, the party may well be one of the strongest in places such as Mures county, where ethnic Hungarians are expected to vote in higher numbers motivated by rivalry with ethnic Romanians, yet, absurdly, fail to win representation for the county in Bucharest.

Because a party needs to achieve at least 5 percent of the votes cast nationwide in order to be represented in parliament, the UDMR--the only ethnic-Hungarian party able to run under its own name--could find itself without any elected legislators in Bucharest when the next parliament sits.

Whatever happens in November, the UDMR is unlikely to face a serious threat from any other Hungarian political force in the foreseeable future. An opinion survey earlier this year by the Transylvanian Interethnic Relations Research Center in Targu Mures found that one in four ethnic Hungarians favored greater participation of alternative Hungarian organizations in elections, but only 5 percent to 7 percent said they would vote for them--figures matched by the actual results in June, when no independent candidate endorsed by the UCM obtained more than 4 percent of the vote in races for town or county councilor.

UDMR campaign director Zsolt Nagy, also from Targu Mures, admits that the party needs to regain its momentum in Szeklerland but is still optimistic ahead of the elections. He points out that in county councilor races in June, the party gathered 514,000 votes, 1,000 more than during the local elections four years ago despite a slowly decreasing population. This figure represented 5.6 percent of the nationwide vote. In all previous cases, he says, more people have voted in parliamentary elections than in local ones. “I cannot see why we could not obtain 5 percent of the votes nationally in November. Our estimates show us winning up to 6.3 percent,” he says.

Another factor could bring out the ethnic-Hungarian vote: the nationalist Greater Romania Party and Romanian National Unity Party, who many observers expect to unleash anti-Hungarian campaign rhetoric mainly in ethnically mixed parts of Transylvania. Here again Targu Mures may prove to be the region's bellwether: it is where the nationalist parties enjoy relatively strong support and it is home of the speaker of the otherwise more democratic National Liberals, Senator Gheorghe-Eugen Nicolaescu, who in the past has come out with anti-Hungarian declarations himself.

It could be Romanian nationalism that preserves the Hungarian minority's three dozen and more seats in parliament come November.

Source: Transitions online