
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 2, 1990                   TAG: 9005020602
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A/9   EDITION: EVENING 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: BUDAPEST, HUNGARY                                LENGTH: Medium

1956 REVOLT LEADER NAMED HUNGARY'S PRESIDENT

The new democratic Parliament today cemented Hungary's break with its communist past by choosing as interim president a writer who was jailed for six years after the anti-Soviet revolt of 1956.

Arpad Goencz, 68, was elected house speaker and interim president after Hungary's rival main parties, the center-right Hungarian Democratic Forum and the liberal League of Free Democrats, forged a surprise agreement.

The Forum controls 164 seats and the Free Democrats 94, but Goencz needed the backing of other parties for the two-thirds majority required to win election in the 394-seat legislature.

When the vote was announced after a secret ballot, Goencz won 339 of the 370 votes cast. The post of president is largely ceremonial in Hungary.

Goencz replaces interim president Matyas Szueroes, a member of the Socialist Party that grew out of the old Communist Party and governed until being roundly defeated in free elections in March and April.

Szueroes was elected one of three deputy speakers. Historian Gyoergy Szabad, 66, and a founding member of the Democratic Forum, was voted Goencz's chief deputy with 348 votes. Vince Voeroes, leader of the Smallholders Party, was the third deputy elected.

Goencz promised to uphold Hungary's new democratic system, saying: "I know that confidence cannot be returned, only lost." He spoke in a brief thank-you address to Hungary's first democratic Parliament in more than 40 years.

Before the vote, a year to the day after Hungary opened the Iron Curtain and paved the way to Eastern Europe's revolt against communism, deputies filed into Parliament's lofty chamber, newly stripped of its Communist Party coat of arms.

The insignia of the old "People's Republic," renamed simply the "Republic of Hungary" in October, was removed just last week.

In another gesture symbolizing Hungary's transition from communism to democracy, many deputies arrived from St. Stephen's Cathedral, reviving a long-lost tradition of attending Mass before opening Parliament.

The deputies also bid a formal farewell to the caretaker government of Socialist Miklos Nemeth, likely to be replaced this month by Jozsef Antall, leader of the Hungarian Democratic Forum, which won the elections.

Goencz, a lawyer who entered politics after World War II as a member of the then-dominant Smallholders' Party, has headed the Hungarian Writers' Union since last December.

He spent six years in jail after the 1956 revolt against Stalinism before winning a reprieve on his life sentence in the general amnesty of 1963.

At a news conference before the vote, Antall said his party and the rival Free Democrats also had agreed that Parliament - and not the nation as a whole - would choose the final president.

Goencz is likely to get that post once a coalition government is formed by mid-May and the constitution is amended, likely in early June, Antall said at a joint news conference with Free Democrat leader Peter Toelgyessy.

by CNB