Gyula János Horn (5 July 1932 – 19 June 2013) was a Hungarian politician who was the Prime Minister of Hungary from 1994 to 1998.
Horn was the last Communist Minister of Foreign Affairs of Hungary. He played a major role in demolishing the "Iron Curtain" for East Germans in 1989, contributing to the later unification of Germany. During his premiership, he launched the Bokros package, the biggest fiscal austerity programme in post-communist Hungary, in 1995.
Horn was born in Budapest in 1932 as the third child of transport worker Géza Horn who was of Jewish background and factory worker Anna Csörnyei. He was brought up in a Lutheran household. They lived in conditions of poverty at the so-called "Barrack" estate between Nagyicce and Sashalom. There were seven brothers in the family: filmmaker Géza (1925–1956), Károly (1930–1946), Tibor (1935), Sándor (1939), Tamás (1942) and Dénes (1944).
After the German occupation of Hungary, his father was kidnapped by the Gestapo due to communist activities in 1944 and never returned. Gyula Horn's niece is Szófia Havas (b. Szófia Horn, 1955), Member of Parliament between 2006 and 2010, whose father Géza, Jr. was killed under unclear circumstances during the 1956 revolution.
He first studied in a lower technicians' school in Hungary. He graduated from the Rostov-on-Don College of Economics and Finance in 1954. He finished the political academy of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (MSZMP) in 1970. He received Candidate of Economic Sciences in 1977.
He married statistician Anna Király in February 1956 and had two children: Anna (1956) and Gyula, Jr. (1969).
In 1954 Horn joined the Hungarian communist party, then called the Hungarian Working People's Party (MDP). In November 1956, he helped reorganize the MDP into the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (MSZMP), which under the leadership of János Kádár crushed the 1956 Hungarian revolution against Soviet occupation and communist rule.
Horn worked in the Ministry of Finance from 1954 to 1959. He got a job in the Foreign Ministry in 1959, first as an official in the independent Soviet department. In the 1960s he was a diplomat in the Hungarian embassies in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.
In 1969 Horn became an official in the foreign affairs department of the MSZMP Central Committee. By 1983 he rose to the rank of department head. In 1985 he was appointed secretary of state (deputy minister) in the Foreign Ministry. In 1989 he stepped forward to become foreign minister in the country's last communist government led by Miklós Németh. By this time, Horn had become a prominent member of the party's reformist wing, which wanted to jettison the goulash Communism of Kádár in favour of Western-style democracy and a market economy.
As a minister he was in charge of foreign affairs when Hungary decided to open the western border (the "Iron Curtain") to East Germans wishing to emigrate to West Germany. He is often credited with having a major part in the decision and, consequently, a role in German unification.
He and his Austrian counterpart Alois Mock posed for cameras on 27 June 1989 to cut through a barbed wire frontier fence, in a largely symbolic act of rapprochement which had been planned months before. As foreign minister he ordered the border to be opened to allow East Germans gathered in Hungary by the thousands to cross into Austria, and from there to West Germany. With this act he greatly contributed to the later unification of Germany. Within weeks tens of thousands of East Germans, who travelled to Hungary with "tourist" visas, headed straight for the unfortified border and walked into the West. Horn outraged his East German counterparts when he told them that international treaties on refugees took precedence over a 1969 agreement between Budapest and East Berlin limiting freedom of movement. The fall of East German communism and the process of German unification had been launched. With dizzying speed, communist governments in the region succumbed to popular uprisings and sheer fatigue. Within a few years, the Soviet Union itself had evaporated.
Horn helped lead the transformation of the MSZMP into the Hungarian Socialist Party later in 1989. As foreign minister he prepared and signed the Hungarian-Soviet troop withdrawal agreement in March 1990. Among the politicians of the transitional era, including representatives of civil opposition, he was the first in Hungary who raised and suggested the issue of possible membership in NATO and the European Union.
He was elected to Parliament in 1990 and retained a seat until the 2010 parliamentary election. The Socialists were roundly defeated in that election, taking only 33 seats. He served as Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs between 1990 and 1993, until his resignation. Also in 1990, he succeeded Rezső Nyers as chairman of the Socialist Party.
Between 1990 and 1995, he was a member of the Governing Board of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). He also functioned as one of the vice presidents of the Socialist International from 1996 to 2003.
Horn led the Socialists to a comprehensive victory in the 1994 parliamentary election. The MSZP leaped from a paltry 33 seats in 1990 to 209, at the time the second-most that a Hungarian party has ever won in a free election. The size of the MSZP landslide took even Horn by surprise. Although the Socialists had more than enough seats to govern alone, Horn suspected he would have trouble getting needed reforms past his own party's left wing. He also wanted to allay concerns both inside and outside Hungary of a former Communist party winning an absolute majority. With this in mind, he went into coalition with the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats, giving him a two-thirds majority. A few days before election day, Horn and his convoy suffered a major car accident between Emőd and Nyékládháza on the way back from a campaign closing event from Miskolc; Horn suffered a cervical fracture and was forced to wear a halo brace for months.
In 1995, Horn's government enacted the "Bokros package", a major austerity program. This was a difficult decision for a social democratic party, and Horn had to expend considerable effort to get most of his party to agree to it.
Although Horn relinquished leadership of the party after the Socialists lost the 1998 election to Viktor Orbán and Fidesz, he was for a long time considered to have considerable influence in the party, partly because of his personal popularity among elderly voters. However, after 2002 he went into semi-retirement. The Medgyessy Cabinet appointed him Special Rapporteur for the European Union. He received second place in the election list of the MSZP during the 2004 European Parliament election in Hungary, however Horn stated before the election that would not become an MEP.
Horn has received several awards for his achievements in foreign relations, among others the Charlemagne Award of the city of Aachen in 1990. He did not, however, get the Civil Division of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary in 2007, suggested by Ferenc Gyurcsány, as it was refused by Hungarian President László Sólyom, who explicitly stated Horn's views on the 1956 revolution as the reason.