How does a country whose political expression had been monopolized by the Communist regime pave a road to democracy? Like other satellite states emerging from Communism in late 1989, Hungary needed a new vocabulary to communicate unfamiliar ideals. The gateway opened after the Communist Party and opposition organizations joined in a series of roundtable negotiations to manage the dismantling of the old Communist order and to write the new "rules of the game" for electoral competition. They scheduled free elections for the spring of 1990, unprecedented in Hungary's 41-year tenure as a satellite of the Soviet state. Both hope and uncertainty built among the new electorate. The imminent elections spurred hundreds of political parties into existence. A minimum number of signatures entitled each party to state money, radio and television time and the right to vie for public support. It was in stark contrast to the previous four decades, when Hungary had labored under the strictures typical of Communist states: restricted rights of assembly; a one-party system; lack of freedom of speech; the unavailability of radio, television and newspapers to put forth alternative political messages.
The leaders of fledgling political organizations faced an additional challenge: how could they communicate their democratic leadership when, so recently, the only permissible political symbols suggested the hammer and the sickle? Political posters were the medium of choice; they were readily available and a dependable means of communicating announcements and events. Some of the best graphic artists in Hungary volunteered their talents to create them. With visual metaphor, artists and political leaders laid the first bricks on the road to democracy. This selection of political posters vividly expresses their need to eradicate the trappings of the Communist regime. Plastered on walls and buildings throughout Hungary, these posters express the exuberance, the passion and the insecurity of a country releasing itself from its Communist ties and seeking the new images, symbols and vocabulary for their democratic aspirations. In this collection we see that democratization produces far-reaching changes--not only in electoral political processes but also in the system's visual symbols.
