The Liberal Party, under the iron grip of Kálmán Tisza, had for three decades governed with the cold precision of a machine, its gears oiled by suffrage laws that disenfranchised the masses and electoral districts carved to magnify the voices of the privileged.

“The Liberals,” wrote the Hungarian historian Gyula Szekfű, “were not stewards of democracy but jailers of the national spirit, their power built on a scaffold of exclusion and artifice.”[1] By 1904, the embers of dissent had become an inferno.

As Péter Hanák noted, “The Compromise’s economic clauses were not merely unfair—they were a noose around Hungary’s neck, tightening with each passing year.”[3] By 1900, over 60% of peasants were landless, their wages stagnant at 1–2 florins a day, while the urban poor crowded into tenements like Budapest’s infamous “Iron Gate” district.

At its helm stood Ferenc Kossuth, whose very name summoned the echoes of his father’s revolution, and Count Albert Apponyi, the silver-tongued aristocrat who marshaled the forces of tradition against the Liberals’ secularizing zeal.

Yet this alliance, as Ignác Romsics observed, “was less a brotherhood of ideals than a marriage of desperation—a fragile pact between magnates and radicals, clerics and reformers, each nursing visions of a Hungary reborn.”[6] The nationalist coalition’s demands were: Yet beneath this unity lurked tensions.

As Alice Freifeld noted, “The coalition was a mosaic of contradictions—a fragile alliance that would crumble under the weight of its own ambitions.”[7] When the Hungarian people cast their ballots in January 1905, they delivered a verdict that reverberated across Europe.

Fejérváry’s “government of military officers” was, in the biting words of Gábor Gyáni, “a cabinet of phantoms—a ministry conjured from the shadows of the Hofburg, answerable not to the Diet, but to the Crown alone.”[10] Its ranks were filled with aristocrats like Interior Minister Béla Serényi, whose disdain for democracy was matched only by his devotion to the Emperor, and bureaucrats like Sándor Wekerle, a holdover from the Liberal era.

[citation needed] Before the next 1910 election the Liberals, reborn as the National Party of Work under István Tisza, exploited this disarray, regaining power in 1910 through alliances with conservatives and industrialists.