Description:
Peacefulness - Independent Smallholders' Party is a 1947 vintage Hungarian political propaganda poster for the 1947 elections.
The 1947 Hungarian parliamentary elections, which later became known as the "blue-ballot" elections, were held in Hungary on 31 August 1947. The Hungarian Communist Party, which had lost the previous election, consolidated its power in the interim using salami tactics. Communist-led political intrigues had deprived their opposition of its democratically won mandate from 1945, as numerous prominent anti-Communists were removed from office on charges of conspiracy. These conspiracies reached a climax in late May 1947, when the Hungarian Communist Party deposed the democratically elected prime minister Ferenc Nagy in a coup d'état, removing one of the strongest opponents to their rule and crippling the opposition. This weakening of the opposition, combined with a revised electoral law, led to further Communist gains. This would be the last remotely competitive election held in Hungary until 1990.
The Independent Smallholders' Party had won a large majority in the previous elections in 1945, but the Soviet-dominated Allied Control Commission had forced it into a coalition government which gave the Hungarian Communist Party key positions including the Ministry of Interior. Communist intrigues had then forced dozens of potent political rivals out of the ruling coalition on the grounds of ostensible reaction. In early 1947, the Communists accused large sections of the Smallholders' Party of complicity in the "Hungarian Fraternal Community" conspiracy, using it as an excuse to expel over 40 MPs and deprive the FKGP of its legally won parliamentary majority. In the process, Soviet troops kidnapped Béla Kovács—general secretary of the Smallholders' Party—on 25 February and deported him to the USSR, where he would be imprisoned for eight years. This had culminated in the ouster of the democratically elected Prime Minister Ferenc Nagy, who was blackmailed into exile in May 1947 under threat of being "revealed" as part of the plot. (source: wikipedia.org)
