35
Reflecting on the reasons for the Slovak cooperation, the SMK secretary points out:
“We may thank our party leader, Béla Bugár, for the good image of our party; the Slovaks like him they say he is a
good guy; his only problem is that he is Hungarian.”
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Klara Sarkozy, member of parliament for the SMK concurs:
“The reasons for the contact between Slovak and Hungarian parties were personal relationships. We did not
approach this cooperation as a good or a bad thing. Rather as a necessary thing: unite against the main danger of the
time, Mečiar.”
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On the Slovak side, Moravcik notes:
“Discussion with them [Hungarian leaders] were very hard, but I respected them and we always managed to agree. I
think from this perspective that Hungarian parties were parties of stability and the only problem I have with them is
this question of territorial autonomy.”
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Furthermore, the same personal factor helped maintain the interethnic connections during the
difficult times when the Slovak opposition felt it was politically too dangerous to support the
Hungarians. Duray remembers:
“during our personal meetings, we always said we could govern together and they [the Slovaks] always reassured us
that, although they could not say it openly, they would certainly accept us as coalition partners at the right time.”
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Another factor that facilitated the interethnic cooperation was the Romanian and Slovak
oppositions’ concern with their countries’ standing on the international stage and their
unanimous desire to accede to the Euro-Atlantic organizations that the governments had
disregarded. Thus, while international constraints had little effect on the Romanian and Slovak
government’s policies, oppositions took the conditions imposed by the West much more
seriously. Cooperation with ethnic Hungarian parties carried the benefit of conforming to the
West’s demands regarding the rights of ethnic minorities and showing that not all ethnic majority
politicians agreed with the governmental position towards minorities. One of my Romanian
interviewees remembers Corneliu Coposu, the leading figure of the National Peasant Party,
saying: “We need to enter Europe holding hands with Hungary. This is the key to our
integration.”
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Peter Weiss, the Slovak SLD leader, concurs:
“I think it as very important for us to have Hungarians in the government; it was very easy to convince Europe that
we are democratic, because we proved we can work with them.”
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Moreover, Hungarians were instrumental to speed up the inclusion of opposition parties in
European organizations. For example, the Romanian liberals used the UDMR’s connections in
the Liberal International to join the organization. The UDMR became a member of the European
Democratic Union before the PNT-CD, while within the United Nations, the Hungarians were
part of the “unrepresented nations and people’s organizations” to which the Romanian parties
Convention