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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • urgenthexagon@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlHow i feel on Lemmy
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    1 year ago

    I am quite certain that there are proportionally more communists in post-socialist countries than in Western countries. According to the results of the “Rendszerváltás 30” public opinion survey conducted in 2020 by Policy Solutions, Závecz Research, and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 52% of the Hungarian population believes that the relative standard of living was better during the Kádár era, while 31% think it was worse. (Page 24) Of course, this doesn’t mean that 52% of the respondents are communists, but the results significantly contradict this meme. Is there any source to support the claim that there is a higher proportion of communists in Western countries compared to post-socialist countries?
    I cannot speak for other countries, but here, the Kádár-era remains popular for many people even to this day, particularly among those who lived during that time.


  • That was disrespectful, literally no one in Hungary thinks positively of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the oppression of the Habsburg Empire. It was not a coincidence that in 1918 the monarchy was overthrown by revolution and replaced with a people’s republic then with a soviet republic in 1919.


  • I am Hungarian, and it would have made more sense to bring up any other post-socialist country instead. One of the most popular historical leaders of Hungary is János Kádár, who was the one who requested help from the Soviet Union in 1956 after Imre Nagy announced that he would withdraw from the Warsaw Pact.

    Also, at the second parliamentary election after the socialist era, MSZP (one of the successor parties of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, alongside the Hungarian Workers’ Party) campaigned on the promise of democratically restoring all the “good things” (they put it this way) from socialism, which immediately won them all the parliamentary seats that could be won by one party in 1994. Of course, the MSZP did not keep any of their campaign promises and implemented more neoliberal policies with strong austerity (the infamous Bokros package). The then-prime minister, Gyula Horn, also made explicitly anti-strike statements. As a result, there was a significant chance that the still-Marxist Hungarian Workers’ Party would enter parliament in the 1998 parliamentary election. Therefore, the parliamentary parties voted to raise the electoral threshold in common agreement, so that this could not happen.

    TLDR: In Hungary, the assessment of the socialist era is not as black and white as many people think.