"...Andrassy's pledge to expand the male electorate even further and pass a secret ballot along with it, meant to appeal not just to the intransigent Greens but also to the Emperor, who saw the best avenue to Vienna's further control of Hungary being more minorities, particularly Slovaks and Romanians, included in the franchise. Andrassy was a staunch loyalist and his descriptions of Karolyi are not fit to print; however, he was a fundamentally pragmatic man, a technocrat and diplomat at heart, and took the long view that the crisis that the Dual Monarchy found itself in could not be solved merely by window-dressing but real, tangible negotiation and compromise "that would pain all, but for the benefit of the many."
The issue that faced Andrassy was twofold, however. One, he was even less open to Green ideas about a full constitutional renegotiation of the Compromise than Bethlen had been, and Andrassy held Karolyi responsible for Bethlen's failure. The second was that the positions of Karolyi and the other Milan Magyars, as well as the position of Vienna, had also hardened considerably over the previous six months. Accordingly, the December Crisis erupted at the end of 1917 as Karolyi declared from the balcony of the Swiss chalet where he was wintering [1] to a small crowd that "it shall be the course of our partisans in Budapest to defeat any and every measure brought forth in the Diet until constitutional reform is achieved." In case one struggled to read between the lines of what Karolyi was saying, it was a direct threat to bring down the Hungarian government and effectively filibuster every act in the Diet unless his demands mere met, and his proposed Compromise - or some new version of it - was the only acceptable outcome.
Ferdinand was outraged, and a headline from the Sunday Times in London summed up the situation succinctly: "Hungary Hostage!" Karolyi's popularity in other capitals declined sharply, and as the situation in Budapest grew darker over the course of December, King Victor Emanuel pondered refusing to allow Karolyi's return from Switzerland to Milan, but was persuaded by French diplomats not to in order to avoid escalating the situation further. Worsening the situation was inevitable, however, with the impasse showing no signs of breaking. Andrassy, unlike Bethlen, was not willing to humiliate himself on the floor of the Diet and had absolute confidence that the Greens were not bluffing, as they had shown no signs of bluffing previously in the prior year. Accordingly, he journeyed to Vienna in late December to consult with Ferdinand and chart out a course forward.
Andrassy's prewar diaries are an excellent primary source of the various machinations ongoing in Vienna during these critical days and weeks, and they do not reflect well on Ferdinand, Karl von Sturgkh, or anyone in the Prague Circle. Andrassy was a reliable conservative in the contours of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy but showed a number of liberal tendencies (particularly on economics) and, while quite a devout man, was skeptical of the kind of "nationalist Catholicism" that was increasingly in vogue in Vienna amongst the Emperor's nearest advisors. His depiction of Vienna was, unsurprisingly for such an astute political operator, one of a city that was just as much in crisis as Budapest, only that where "everyone can see the conflict in Hungary looming overhead like a thunderstorm, in Cisleithnia there is no sense of urgency, just babble." What he was referring to specifically was the increasingly agitated politics of minority parties in the Imperial Landsrat, particularly the Young Czech Party; Viennese attended parliamentary debates for entertainment, not because they were high-minded experts in public policy but rather because the speeches were long, meandering and fiery, as amusing as opera or the theater and, unlike those diversions, free of charge to the general public. Andrassy himself commented on the immense irony that at just the moment that the Habsburg Crown was most reliant on "national minorities" in Hungary to preserve the throne, it was several national minorities in the other half of the Empire that were bringing the gears of state to a grinding halt.
The trip to Vienna solved little and caused only more problems. Berchtold asked pointedly how to "navigate Scylla and Charibdys," to which Andrassy replied that, fundamentally, there was no solution that did not involve either conceding to Karolyi or simply ruling by decree. Either way, he observed, the spirit of '67 was effectively dead in Hungary; the country could either be a dictatorship within Austria, or a democracy outside of it. Ferdinand was aghast and exploded in a tirade in which he accused the Magyars of treason against the Crown, denouncing Karolyi in particular. Andrassy attempted to calm the room by suggesting that there were some ideas in Karolyi's putative Compromise that were perhaps worth considering, first and foremost relying upon the Palatine of Hungary as a true viceregal representative; he also pointed out that Ferdinand's delay in arranging a coronation in Budapest to symbolically take the Crown of St. Stephen had offended the Hungarian street, and that such a coronation should occur posthaste. Eventually, though, all roads led to one place - Hungary was currently ungovernable, and as long as the Greens and Reds sat in the Diet, there could be no solution.
Dismayed by this outcome, Andrassy returned dutifully to Budapest on December 29, 1917 and announced that afternoon the suspension of the Diet of Hungary, under the reason that there "was no possibility of it functioning to pass laws on behalf of the Magyar public." The adjournment was initially intended to last only three month, even though formally it was indefinite; in practice, the Diet of Hungary would not reconvene again until the conclusion of the Central European War, when the political realities of the country were very different. Andrassy thus became the autocratic Prime Minister of the Transleithnian realm, with every emergency decree he filed taking the force of law; he decreed a two-year extension of the existing Compromise through January 1, 1920, hoping that this would buy time for a major renegotiation of the Dual Monarchy's superstructure that could appease both Vienna and Magyar nationalists.
There was little way this maneuver could indeed have worked even in the best of times, but things were made considerably worse just three weeks later on January 23rd, 1918, when Karl von Sturgkh followed Andrassy into the brink and announced an indefinite adjournment of the Landsrat due to the frequent filibustering and political gridlock, choosing to himself rule by emergency decree. Effectively, both halves of Austria were now absolute monarchies again, their democratic organs "temporarily" suspended, and Ferdinand ruling directly through appointed cabinets of ministers close to himself or the Prague Circle. It was a remarkably quick extinguishing of one of Central Europe's budding young democracies and tipped the hand on the vision Ferdinand had for the long term: a centralized Habsburg state, with Vienna empowered, fundamentally tied to Church and Crown..."
- Ferdinand: The Last Emperor
[1] Real man of the people, Mihail Karolyi