Background
He was born in Mór to a Danube Swabian family, in the comitatus of Fejér. His mother was Antónia Szép.
He was born in Mór to a Danube Swabian family, in the comitatus of Fejér. His mother was Antónia Szép.
After studying law at the University of Budapest he graduated doctor juris. He then entered the government service, and after a period of probation was appointed to a post in the ministry of finance. He still, however, continued an academic career by lecturing on political economy at the university.
Wekerle served most of his career in the Hungarian civil service: secretary of state in the Finance Ministry in 1886, liberal parliamentary delegate the following year, minister of finance from 1889 to 1895, and, concurrently, from 1892 to 1895, minister-president. In the latter year, Wekerle legalized mixed marriages among Catholics, Protestants, and Jews in Hungary and introduced obligatory civil marriage, a measure adamantly opposed by the Conservatives and one that caused his fall from power. An old-line Liberal, Wekerle returned to head a coalition government in 1906; he basically favored upholding the Compromise of 1867 in the face of demands for revision and for the creation of an independent Hungarian army. However, the minister-president in 1906 clashed with Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the heir presumptive, in his call for introducing the Hungarian language into the joint army. The archduke, in fact, informed Wekerle that once he acceded to the throne, he would seek to revoke Hungary's special position in Habsburg military affairs. An opportunist and able parliamentary tactician, Wekerle managed to cling to office until 1910, surviving numerous Cabinet reorganizations and enduring the verbal diatribes of Hungarian Independence delegates anxious to sever the tie to Vienna.
On August 20, 1917, at nearly seventy years of age, Wekerle again resumed the minister-presidency under the exigencies of wartime exhaustion. Without a solid party base, the staunch Magyar at first opposed all attempts to reform the Dual Monarchy along federalist lines; deep down he desired to annex Dalmatia and Bosnia (the corpus separatum) to Hungary. However, his greatest undertaking proved to be the reform of the restricted Hungarian suffrage in November 1917 by 40 percent beyond the existing 1.8 million voters. In the end, this measure died in Parliament in the face of stiff Magyar opposition. Perhaps to compensate for this obstruction, Wekerle, supported by his war minister, Alexander Szurmay, that same November pushed Emperor Charles into honoring an earlier pledge to create a separate Hungarian army after the war. This proposal to divide the joint army into separate Austrian and Hungarian armies was not only unrealistic by the end of 1917 but also met with the determined opposition of most Habsburg marshals the following month; this notwithstanding, the Hungarians as late as September 12, 1918, sought to implement such a scheme.
In the field of foreign policies, Wekerle in July 1918 defended Foreign Minister Ottokar Czernin against attacks for the "Sixtus letter," in which the Viennese diplomat had suggested that Alsace-Lorraine be returned by Germany to France as a precondition for a general European peace. Early in 1918 widespread strikes especially in Budapest forced Wekerle to promise once again the creation of an independent Hungarian army after the war. His greatest hour, however, came shortly before the end of the war. On October 15, 1918, Wekerle opposed Emperor Charles' decision to promulgate the conversion of Cisleithanian Austria into a federation of independent states; specifically, the Hungarian leader threatened to curtail all food shipments to Austria unless Charles exempted Hungary from this order. In the end, Wekerle carried the day, and Charles promised to maintain the integrity of the lands of the Crown of St. Stephen at the cost of Croat, German, Rumanian, Ruthenian, and Serb national groups.
But the dissolution of the Dual Monarchy could not be checked, and on October 19 Wekerle officially announced the independence of Hungary, disavowing the Realunion of 1867 and clinging only to the fiction of a personal union under the Habsburgs as a last tie. Yet even this action came too late, and the shrewd compromiser on October 23 yielded to the aristocratic frondeur, M. Karolyi, as minister-president. Well remembered by his political opponents as the man who had squelched the Independence party insurgency in 1906, Wekerle was left out of the mainstream of Hungarian politics in the immediate postwar period; he died in Budapest on August 26, 1921.
