Hungary

By JOHN BORRELL BUDAPEST

On the concrete wall of an underpass on Rakoczi Street in Budapest, someone has scrawled in black crayon DOWN WITH COMMUNISTS. Two years ago, such a sign of opposition would have been quickly removed by Hungary's Communist rulers. Now the graffiti not only survive, but the Communists are saying much the same thing themselves.

Such is the pace of political change in Hungary these days that last year's political blasphemy is this week's new truth. In keeping with the wholesale undoing of the past, the ruling party, formerly known as the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party, is no longer officially Communist. At a five-day congress that ended in Budapest last week, 1,274 delegates voted overwhelmingly to take the Communism out of socialism and become the Hungarian Socialist Party. They also sent hard-line General Secretary Karoly Grosz into political oblivion and repudiated much of four decades of Communist rule, including the suppression of the 1956 uprising by Soviet troops.

The switch is the most complete undertaken by a Communist Party in Eastern Europe. Not even in Poland, where a Solidarity-led coalition has been governing for nearly two months, have Communists subjected themselves to so radical a purge of their political philosophy. In Hungary it marks the end of the party-state, the Marxist concept of a fused identity that still underpins governments in Beijing, Havana and Bucharest. The party will even examine ways of divesting itself of property acquired during the 40 years in which it and the state were virtually indistinguishable.

Such concessions were too much for some of the party's hard-liners. They set about forming their own political groups, each claiming to represent the ideals of the old Communist Party. "We will soldier on as a Communist Party," said Roland Antoniewicz, leader of the Janos Kadar Society, one newborn hard-line splinter named after the party's longtime leader who died in July.

Yet the party may not have gone far enough -- for its own sake or for the sake of most Hungarians. "This is just a new label on an old bottle," complains Gyorgy Ruttner, an opposition leader who heads the Social Democratic Party. Aware that the bottle's contents might seem familiar and sour, the more radical reformers among the Communists wanted an even sharper break with the past, including expulsion of Old Guard hard-liners. In the end, moderates led by Rezso Nyers, 66, who was elected party president, stitched together a compromise that held the party together but may jeopardize its chances in the next elections.

Much of the impetus for reform flowed from the fact that early next year Hungary is to have the most open balloting in the East bloc in four decades. At least a dozen parties will be competing with the Hungarian Socialist Party for the 374 seats in Parliament. Reformers within the Communist ranks contended that without a fresh image, they stand no chance at the polls. In four recent by-elections, the Democratic Forum, which has only 20,000 registered members, in contrast to the 700,000 claimed by the Communist Party, has easily defeated candidates put up by the ruling party. The liberal, nationalistic Forum could continue its winning streak.

"The new Socialist Party will get 20% to 30% of the vote at the most," says Istvan Hegedus, an official of the radical youth group Young Democrats. Some opinion polls are predicting that as little as 15% of the voters will cast their ballots for the new party. Even such a low figure would not rule out a political role for the onetime Communists, since the Democratic Forum, expected to win a plurality, says it favors a grand coalition involving all political groups.

The Socialist Party will get a reading on the electorate's mood in late November, when presidential elections are scheduled. Its candidate is Imre Pozsgay, a former Politburo member who has emerged over the past year as the Communists' leading reformer. Opinion polls suggest that he has an attractive public image. Thus, as a Western diplomat in Budapest observes, "if Pozsgay can't pull it off, the new party is doomed right away."

As of now, Pozsgay faces no official challengers, although the Independent Smallholders Party, which mainly represents farmers, enlivened the political debate when it proposed Hungary's last crown prince, Otto von Habsburg, as its presidential candidate. The son of Emperor Karl I, who ruled the Austro- Hungarian empire from 1916 until its collapse in 1918, Von Habsburg, 76, retains Hungarian citizenship despite being a resident of West Germany and holding a seat in the European Parliament. Von Habsburg, a popular figure in Hungary, seriously considered running but at week's end revealed that he had decided against it. "I can currently do more in the European Community for the return of Hungary into the community of free peoples," he said.

The Democratic Forum says it will field a candidate, but Pozsgay probably has stature enough to win a five-year term as President under a constitution -- soon to be approved by Parliament -- that is expected to invest considerable powers in the post. The revamped party's prospects in parliamentary elections, however, look less promising -- not necessarily a cheering development for the cause of political reform in general in the East bloc.

Although hardly a consideration for more than a handful of voters, a Pozsgay victory and a good showing by his party in the general elections could be a boost for glasnost everywhere. It would show hard-liners in the bloc that change need not be the first step toward political suicide and might even suggest that those deft enough to amend their ideology will not necessarily be cast aside in open elections. The opposite applies as well, however: if the reformed Communists are savaged by the voters, the Old Guard everywhere will be digging in its heels. If in the electorate's eyes there is no such thing as a good ex-Communist, why become one?