"Too Much Medicine"

The familiar farce of a totalitarian election--totally rigged, that is--moved toward its familiar climax last week in Hungary. The Social Democrats, the Smallholders and the National Peasants had been tamed and absorbed into the Communist-dominated Government "coalition." Of real anti-Communist opposition there was almost none.

Dezso Sulyok's Freedom Party was out of action. Sulyok had been "advised" to get out of the country until election day was over. Bald, moon-faced Sulyok complied.

That left Zoltan Pfeiffer, a lawyer evicted from the Smallholders, as the only anti-Communist politician of consequence in Hungary, and the Red goon squads went enthusiastically to work on Pfeiffer's Independence Party. They broke up a meeting at Szentes, 80 miles southeast of Budapest, by throwing eggs, vegetables, yellow paint and bricks. A newsman was deafened, temporarily at least, when struck on the ear by a cantaloupe.

Pfeiffer then moved his followers on the nearby town of Csongrad and tried again. The Reds attacked Pfeiffer and one of his lieutenants with bicycle pumps, shoemaker's pliers and clubs. Pfeiffer was taken home "half dead," his friends said. A U.S. Army doctor who tried to examine him was waved away; even Hungarian civilian doctors were barred. A Communist-appointed police surgeon took over the case, pronounced the patient's injuries superficial. If that was so, Pfeiffer's wife wanted to know, why had her husband not regained consciousness? Oh, said the police surgeon, somebody had given him "too much medicine."

At a press conference a Ministry of Information spokesman, Ivan Boldizar, insisted that free speech and fair play had been guaranteed, even to the misguided opposition. Foreign newsmen estimated that 1,200,000 voters had been disfranchised, including several aged Jewish women who had escaped from the Nazis' crematory camp at Auschwitz, and who nevertheless were accused of "Fascist taint." Some of the disfranchised had lost their votes after the deadline for appeal. Spokesman Boldizar was asked if he thought this was fair play. "Well," he said, "no election laws are perfect."

Why, asked the correspondents, had Pfeiffer's party not been allowed to hold a scheduled rally in front of the Parliament building? Boldizar explained that another party had somehow obtained a priority permit for the same place at the same time. What he referred to was an outfit called the Independent Hungarian Democrats, led by one Rev. Istvan Balogh--a tame "opposition" party which the Government had kept around for show-window purposes.

The U.S. Embassy protested, with the usual result. The Government repudiated the protest as "malicious generalization." Last Sunday, the Government won the election, hands down.

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