The Civic Freedom Party (Hungarian: Polgári Szabadságpárt) was the last name of one of the two interbellum liberal parties in Hungary.
The party was founded in 1921 by Károly Rassay as the Independence Party of Smallholders, Workers and Citizens (Függetlenségi Kisgazda Földműves és Polgári Párt, FKFPP) as an attempt to mobilize voters for liberalism outside the cities. Shortly after its foundation it won 3.6% of the popular vote and 8 seats in parliament. It merged in 1926 with the Nemzeti Demokrata Párt (National Democratic Party) into the Independent National Democratic Party (Független Nemzeti Demokrata Párt). The new party won 4.0% of the vote and 9 seats in the 1926 elections.
Rassay reconstituted the separate party in 1928 as the National Liberal Party (Nemzeti Szabadelvű Párt). It was an attempt to build an alternative to the conservative government. The party only won 5 seats in 1931 and in 1935 it won 7 seats. Just before or after the elections the party was renamed the Civic Freedom Party. It won 5 seats in 1939, but it could not survive the radicalisation of Hungary during the Second World War. In 1944 the party dissolved itself.
Famous quotes containing the words civic, freedom and/or party:
“Immorality, perversion, infidelity, cannibalism, etc., are unassailable by church and civic league if you dress them up in the togas and talliths of the Good Book.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)
“The essence of the modern state is that the universal be bound up with the complete freedom of its particular members and with private well-being, that thus the interests of family and civil society must concentrate themselves on the state.... It is only when both these moments subsist in their strength that the state can be regarded as articulated and genuinely organized.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)