Gyula Peidl (4 April 1873 – 22 January 1943) was a Hungarian trade union leader and social democrat politician who served as prime minister and acting head of state of Hungary for 6 days in August 1919.

[1][2] His tenure coincided with a period of political instability in Hungary immediately after World War I, during which several successive governments ruled the country.

[4] During the Mihály Károlyi era following World War I and proclamation of the First Hungarian People's Republic, he was Minister of Labour and Welfare in the government of Dénes Berinkey.

[4][5] The new government unanimously accepted the transfer of power[8] after the Romanian invasion of the capital and, subsequently, the end of the Hungarian Soviet Republic.

[8] The government's position was weak, subject to various pressures: opponents in the capital, Horthy's counter-revolutionary National Army, desertion by some smaller military units, or defectors who left the Socialists after having supported the Hungarian Soviet Republic.

[11] On the same day, the National Smallholders and Agrarian Workers Party (OKGFP) was invited into the government, and the Allied representative promised an end to the economic blockade.

[11] The measures taken quickly by the new government tried to win the sympathies of the bourgeoisie and the peasantry, while the cabinet began on 5 August 1919 a round of talks with the liberal parties.

[16] At the same time, the counterrevolutionary forces conspired to overthrow the government and put the Hungarian prince (and Austrian archduke) Joseph August in power.

[23][24] On the same day, Prince Joseph August[21] became regent[25][23] and István Friedrich, an industrialist, built a new government[26][25][27][21] with career officials from the various ministries and part of the conspirators, generally bourgeois plebeians.

[25] The coup frustrated the possibilities of collaboration between socialists and liberals, and took away from the government some prominent political figures opposed to the seizure of power by force.

[3] He resided in Vienna and Sankt Radegund bei Graz, where he worked as a proofreader, until his return to Hungary in November 1921, where he resumed his trade union activity.

He actively participated in the restructuring process of the Social Democratic Party as a prominent member of the moderate and anti-communist wing.

[3] When the conservative cabinet of István Bethlen applied for a loan from the League of Nations in 1924, Peidl was a member of a Social Democratic delegation to London which urged the British government not to fulfill the request until the re-adoption of universal suffrage, the abolition of the numerus clausus and the extension of assembly act.