Imre Pozsgay

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Imre Pozsgay (born 1933 in Kóny^[1]) is a Hungarian politician who played a key role in Hungary's transition to democracy after 1988.

Pozsgay joined the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party after he graduated with an English degree from the Lenin Institute in Budapest. He worked for the party at both local and national levels and became deputy minister in 1975.

In the late 1980s, he was (although a member of the politburo) one of the first major figures in Hungary to label the 1956 Hungarian revolution not a counterrevolution but a "popular uprising"^[2].

His calls for reform (which he describes in his book Turning Point and Reform) lead to a falling out with the party’s leader János Kádár which in turn moved Poszgay to become chairman of the party’s mass organization the Patriotic Front.

Kádár was removed from his Minister of State position in 1988 and Pozsgay was placed into his old position.

Jointly with Otto von Habsburg, Imre Pozsgay was the sponsor of the Pan-European Picnic of August 19, 1989, where hundreds of East Germans who were visiting Hungary were able to cross the previously impenetrable Iron Curtain into Austria.^[2]

In October 1989, the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party renamed itself the Hungarian Socialist Party and announced Poszgay as their Deputy President. However in 1991 he quit the party to form a new one, which he headed himself, called the National Democratic Alliance. It lasted until 1996.

Pozsgay was a member of the National Assembly of Hungary from 1983 to 1994 and since then has been teaching at the University of Debrecen.^[1]