"Is the existing power subject to the judgment of society or not? This is the key question that determines the degree of freedom in society" - which Sándor Révész asks when he reviews the history of Hungarian parliamentary elections from 1905 to the present day. The answer is both depressing and upsetting: the occasions when people could vote with full, secret suffrage, not just on paper, not in the midst of reprisals, not in an occupied country and not in the shadow of a power cemented by manipulations, were limited to a few years. In Hungary, with the greatest care, they have continuously dictated how the will of the voters cannot prevail.
In the sequels of a political soap opera, Sándor Révész tells us the history of elections based on war and revolutions based on contemporary press materials and reminiscences. liberal, socialist. And before us is the entire panopticon of one hundred years of elite politics, from Vilmos Vázsonyi to István Csurka. And in the tables of the final results of the parliamentary elections, we can often cool down and browse our past expressed in percentages - and our current struggles.
After the author's previous influential portrait volumes - reconstructing the lives of József Antall, György Aczél, Miklós Gimes, István Dobi - he provides an extremely instructive summary of political history.