Kálmán Tisza

Kálmán Tisza de Borosjenő et Szeged (1830-1902) was a Hungarian politician. Tisza was the leader of the Liberal Party which dominated Hungarian politics for the latter part of the 19th century and into the first decade of the twentieth. Although the liberal party had initially been opposed to the conservative Deákists who had made the Ausgleich with Emperor Franz Joseph in 1867, as Prime Minister from 1875, Tisza quickly came to terms with it. During the era when he and Austrian prime minister Count Taaffe dominated Austro-Hungarian politics, the internal state of the monarchy was probably more stable than at any other time in its history. Tisza, like British prime minister Robert Walpole, believed in "letting sleeping dogs lie," and governed in a very conservative manner, opposing any extension of the franchise. Like Walpole, as well, Tisza used patronage and the "rotten boroughs" of the Slovak and Romanian parts of the kingdom to maintain his majority in parliament. Even after his resignation in 1890 he continued to dominate Hungarian politics through his successors, who also came from the Liberal Party, until his death in 1902. His son, István Tisza, was to prove a similarly dominant figure in the next, and more divisive, period of Hungarian history.