Historical roots of Hungarian Christian Democracy IV

In our last articles, we investigated the early historical roots of Hungarian Christian democracy and the appearance of the first Hungarian Christian party, the Catholic People's Party. We also elaborated on the turbulences of the "happy times and peace" and the collapse. As the four articles in this series, this paper investigates the historical roots of Hungarian Christian democracy in the Horthy regime from 1920 to 1944. It should be underlined that due to the length of the period and the complicated relations of political Christianity, only three aspects will be presented. First, in the introduction, the stabilisation of Bethlen’s government will be outlined to place Christian party politics in context. Then, the essence of the regime’s ideology, namely Christian nationalism, will be briefly analysed. In the end, the sprouts of Christian democratic initiatives will be presented. Hungary’s history of Christian politics and the history of Christian ideas would deserve a longer article. Still, the leading ambition is capturing the roots of Hungarian Christian democracy.