Dilemmas Concerning Voting Rights in the Capital at the Time of Budapest’s Unification

Abstract

While in 1848, when the modern political and electoral system was established, the focus of Hungarian debates was still on the electoral threshold and the preservation of the voting rights of the previously privileged classes, after the Compromise of 1867 and the restoration of parliamentarianism, discussions already centered on a new system that restricted universal suffrage: the personal political representation of the largest taxpayers, i.e., the introduction of virilism. Although the citizens of the Hungarian capitals of Buda and Pest rejected the principle of virilism and sought broader representation of the people – as evidenced by Károly Gerlóczy’s draft law of 1869 – they were ultimately only able to achieve the introduction of virilism in a weakened form in Budapest. Analysis of the discourse at the time confirms that this new element – like the retention of the voting threshold and open voting – was in fact merely a power tool in the hands of those in power. The debates at the time also showed that the extension of suffrage and criticism of the virilism introduced in other self-governing units were not really important to the bourgeois classes of the capital itself, but rather to the parliamentary opposition, especially its radical left wing.