To a very large extent, but I'm not sure how much that matters in guilt terms (socialisation and sense of power is another thing). Four factoids in advance:
First, in 1989, there was a party break: the reform wing took over and this led to today's MSzP, while the 'traditionalists' with most of the non-retired nasty guys formed Munkáspárt. Second, since the internal coup that replaced the PM a year ago, most remaining leaders climbed high only in the youth organisation. Third, a lot of former Party members ended up with neither MSzP nor Munkáspárt, but all the other parties on the right and centre. (For example, maybe you remember from the news the names of Imre Pozsgai and Mátyás Szűrös from 1989 - being from the now defunct national-reformist wing of the party, they ended up supporting Fidesz.) Fourth, but important, I also note a local speciality: not all MSzP-nominated ministers are MSzP members (and those typically had no Party past, either), and that includes important and influential posts.
Now, here is the level of taintedness for those I checked:
The leadership of the right wing parties and of the now defunct centrist ex-dissident one include no ex-cadres and almost no ex-party members, not counting those who were members through the sixties before becoming dissidents and bouncing in and out of detention after that. That probably has something to do with the existence of a mass and politically diverse opposition movement in the 1980's which did not exist in Hungary.
I'll note that unlike in Poland it does not seem that the current ex-communist leadership includes those being groomed as the next generation of Party leaders - Miller and Kwasniewski were clearly being fast-tracked to the top and had just about made it there when the whole thing collapsed. Miller had the standard working class route to Party leadership, Kwasniewski the intelligentsia one.
However, prior to 2004, there were three important MSzP leaders who were already top-rated in the eithties:
The relationship of these (past and present) leaders and the MSzP grass-roots reformers is too complex to draw an analogy to what you describe for Poland. The MSzP is a real mess. BTW, I always wanted to ask you this - what is your non-single-sentence opinion of Kwasniewski? On his policies, ideology, style, corruptness, and whether he was some kind of least bad option or not?
Finally, I'm not sure how to interpret that about a lack of mass and diverse political opposition movement - by what measure was it lacking, and what trait is connected to ex-cadre migrating to other parties? I note many of these ex-cadre live in denial (and with the support of whitewashers in their new party) - the worst examples are the once communist, now far-right propagandists; and others 'arrived' only later - when Fidesz tought it needs them to woo a certain kind of voters. (I note that from what I read - or believe having read :-) -, similar 'mixing' happened at least in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, too.) *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
On the other question - I believe that the existence of so many active oppositionists made it both unnecessary and difficult for Party members to get into the non-SLD. There were literally thousands of full time anti-communist activists tied together by both fervent opposition to the system and tight knit social connections. Tens of thousands more (at least) were part-time activists, ten million adults had been members of Solidarity. In those circumstances the taboo against accepting ex-communists was able to be maintained. Hungary never had the sort of comprehensive mass movement bureaucracy that Solidarity automatically created in every factory, university, and institute, down to the smallest towns. When that activist base was decapitated through mass internment in Dec. 1981 new activists immediately stepped up to work underground. These were people with hands on experience in grass roots organizing and political journalism, coming from every class in society with every possible political opinion from left wing socialist to far right.
The far right has plenty of people who worked with the regime, but for the most part they were not Party members. Rather they were members or associates of the PAX movement, a set of collaborationist Catholic organizations created in 1945 by the NKVD under Boleslaw Piasecki, founder and Leader of the ONR-Falanga (Radical-National Organization), the most extreme of Poland's fascist groupings in the thirties. At lower levels some of the former ultra-nationalist Party propagandists work for them, but I don't know of any ex-Party types at the top levels of the extreme right.
Ah, now I understand your distinction.
Yep, in Hungary, up until about 1988 there were two organised groups, each only a few hundred to thousand: the more rebellious liberals and the 'folkish' (rural-connected and conservative) group. When the system started to fall apart and parties were legalised, the new opposition parties constituted organised opposition counting tens of thousands of members. But no equivalent of 25%-of-population membership in some organisation - the great masses only showed themselves in mass protests (March 15).
The two most important parties formed around the aforementioned groups; however, the larger one also received support from nationalist wing 'rebels' in the Party (most of these soon dropped, however), and was taken over by 'dormant' conservatives who didn't do much in terms of active opposition over the last few decades. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
