Page 63 - The Voyage of Hungarian Christian Democracy - Edited by Mária Rita Kiss

“party of the truthful” in the world of untruthful politics, the only party fit for representing the
faithful, supporting Hungarian Christian movements in neighbouring countries and for
promoting recovery from the moral crisis. This strategy focused on countryside areas where
traditions were kept and religious morals were preserved, aiming to draw people who were
not active regarding politics and did not choose a party yet. The other campaign strategy was
intended to build on the image of a European party. Emphasizing the European identity was
supposed to serve two purposes: first, to set off the negative stereotypes generated against the
KDNP and second, to send the message that while the party is a genuine people’s party, it
belongs to everyone, not only to faithful people. In this identity structure, the party would not
be a worldview party in a strict sense, but rather present itself to voters as the representative of
cultural values rooted in European Christianity. As an additional identity element, the party’s
“fitness for governing” was to be highlighted, depicting the party as a rational, pragmatic,
professional political force. Apparently campaign strategists were facing the same dilemma
that people charged with shaping the KDNP’s party identity had been struggling with since
the very beginning: how can the KDNP remain a worldview party and, at the same time,
become able to draw support from a wider segment of society beyond the faithful population,
to get past niche party votes and become a party with serious coalition potential?

While walking their historical path, Western European Christian democratic parties
already gave their own answers to this dilemma. They loosened up their ideological bounds,

realizing the orthodox representation thereof would lock them up with a narrow voter base.
People’s parties brought a new era in the history of political parties, and, in a broader sense,
also in the history of democratic will generation and political representation. By the 1960s,
their accomplishments became apparent primarily in Great Britain, France, Austria and the
Federal Republic of Germany, in respect of both Christian democratic and social democratic
people’s parties.
296

III. The ways of becoming a people’s party

In the party formation process in Hungarian politics in 1988–1990, the identity
strategies of new political parties meant also a choice between different party models as well.
297
When the MDF was able to emerge as the most integrative and mobilizing political force, its
coalition partners the FKgP undertook to represent the agrarian population as a niche party
and the KDNP defined itself as a worldview party of the faithful. At the same time, the
“people’s party” element in the KDNP’s name (retained owing to historical reasons and
indicating that the KDNP was the successor of DNP, once the biggest opposition party in
Hungary’s parliament) suggested that “the due place of Christian democracy” in Hungarian
politics was way above the 4% limit and the small party status that it meant. Documents from
the period of the KDNP’s refoundation indicate that in the beginning the “people’s party”

296 Regarding the historical typology of political parties, see: Zsolt Enyedi–András Körösényi: Pártok és pártrendszerek. [Political Parties and Party Systems].
Osiris Publishing House, Budapest, 2001. pp. 111-119. Hereinafter: Parties and Party Systems.
297 István Schlett: Stabilizálódás, vagy elbizonytalanodás. A pártok 1992-ben. [Stabilization or Hesitation. Political Parties in 1992]. MPÉ. op. cit. 1993.

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