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160 | THE PROFESSIONALISM OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

During the last period of the socialist one-party system inner pluralism developed
within the party leadership, and the party’s reform wing stepped up its fight within the
party against those who insisted on the old methods of control and governance. The
reform wing’s fight strengthened the activity of certain opposition groups outside the
party. These evolved from the alternative civil and intellectual sub-cultural movements
that had coalesced in the 1970s and 1980s around such issues as human rights,
religious tolerance, environmental conservation, national culture, and the rights of
Hungarian minorities in neighbouring countries.

These groups had emerged as substitutes for opposition parties that were not allowed
to exist during the one-party system.They were later to form parties in parallel with the
traditional renascent parties that had been suppressed 40 years earlier. A number of
things linked these embryonic parties, including their nature as movements, their ‘elite’
character, their lack of embeddedness in society at large, and either small membership
or a lack of formal membership.

In the second half of 1989, the rules and the circumstances for the first free elections
were agreed at discussions between the former and emerging political powers at the
so-called ‘Round Table Negotiations’. Following this, these political groups had only a
few months to organise themselves as parties and to persuade potential voters that
only they were capable of solving the nation’s problems and worthy of election in the
first free elections in 40 years. Potential voters, on the whole, were discontented with
the situation – desiring change but politically inarticulate and badly in need of
adequate information on which to base their choice.

Given the fact that the overwhelming majority of the new players in the public sphere
The Professionalisation of Political Communication
were newcomers, it goes without saying that they had no experience in how to run a
multiparty election campaign, how to attract attention and how to compete against
one another. They were, in other words, political amateurs and dilettantes. The label of
political amateurism, however, referred much more to the new players in the public
sphere than to the ‘successors’ of the incumbent socialist party who were also
competing. The latter, however, also found themselves in a new situation and without
their former mass party membership (before the transition the socialists had about 800
thousand members, on the eve of the transition this dropped to 30–40 thousand).They
were thus deprived of the possibility of mobilising at the work place, which had
previously been their home ground.

On the surface, the circumstances of campaigning were similar to those observed in
established democracies where the society was individualised: mass parties no longer
had central bases, confidence of voters in political parties had been shaken, and party
loyalty was weak. As a result, high levels of voter uncertainty and volatility were
common. Although the causes that led to this situation were totally different, the result
was similar. It is understandable though that, when the Hungarian parties were forced
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