Ferenc Kossuth

Lajos Kossuth, Ferenc Ákos ( born November 16, 1841 in Pest, Hungary, † May 25, 1914 in Budapest) was a Hungarian engineer and politician.

Life

Ferenc, eldest son of Lajos Kossuth, succeeded his father after the failed uprising against the Habsburgs in 1850 to emigrate. He studied in Paris and London, Engineering and worked from 1861 in Liguria as a railway engineer. Ferenc Kossuth was involved in the construction of the Mont Cenis Tunnel, worked in industry and mining, and built the first steel bridge over the Nile. Since 1859 he was secretary of the Magyar Nemzeti Igazgatósság, the Hungarian National Directorate, a sort of government in exile for an independent Hungary. Only after the death of his father in 1894 he returned to Hungary. He accompanied his father's body to a magnificent funeral in Budapest. Then Kossuth began his political career; he was in 1895 elected to the Hungarian Parliament in 1897 and leader of the Independence Party.

With the parliamentary elections in 1905, the "Hungarian crisis " began, as the Liberal Party for the first time since the 1867 settlement lost its majority. The Independence Party under Kossuth led a coalition with a parliamentary majority. Point of contention between the throne and the opposition was mainly the abolition of the German command language in the Joint Army.

Nevertheless, in 1905 General Géza Fejervary was used by King Ferenc József as head of government of a caretaker government on June 18. The opposition under Kossuth described the government as unconstitutional because it sprang to any parliamentary majority. Therefore Fejervary ruled with the help of the king, who prorogued Parliament on several occasions, pass the Parliament. The opposition under Kossuth then called the " national resistance " against the " gendarmes government" of, recruitment and tax payments have been denied in many counties.

Interior Minister Jósef Kristóffy then took on negotiations with the social democrats and left liberals, whom he introduced reforms in the electoral law and social policy in view. However, the planned Fejervary universal suffrage threatened the power of the national Magyar aristocratic elites. An explosive domestic political climate was created, in the Vienna War Department were built by General Beck plans developed ( " case U" for Hungary) to quell a possible uprising in Hungary by force. On February 19, 1906 Franz Joseph and Fejervary could occupy militarily even the parliament building by the Honvéd. But the mood in the population and civil taught gradually against the opposition under Kossuth and they agreed on Sándor Wekerle as the new Premier, why Fejervary on April 8, 1906, finally resigned.

Kossuth officiated in the government Wekerle of April 8, 1906 to 17 January 1910 as Trade Minister. He was not a political talent and even implicated in corruption scandals, but because of the aura and the publicity value of his father he was more than a decade a major political force in Hungary.