Appointing a Prime Minister without Clear Parliamentary Majority: A Comparative Historical Analysis

At the beginning of the 20th century both countries, Hungary and the United Kingdom experienced serious constitutional crises. According to Vernon Bogdanor the conflict between the two Houses, the controversy about the Irish Home Rule Act and the appointment of Ramsay MacDonald to prime minister in 1931 shed light on the fact that the British monarch would still have been able to exercise his royal prerogatives (power of veto, swamping the House of Lords, appointing a prime minister without a parliamentary majority). All this in spite of the gradually emergence of the constitutional convention that the monarch should appoint only candidates to prime minister who can provide the confidence of the House of Commons. The effective exercise of the royal prerogative appointing a prime minister provoked an even more serious crises in Hungary in 1905-06. The appointment of his guardsman (Géza Fejérváry) to prime minister despite of an explicit rejection of the parliamentary majority revealed that the Austrian Emperor took his royal prerogative very serious in an exceptional situation. In 1905 it was not only a simple change of government it was the whole political system at stake thus Franz Joseph had to be sure that his government won't disannex Hungary from the Austrian Empire. Since the competence of the monarch to appoint a prime minister - even in absence of the confidence of the parliamentary majority behind him - was one of the most discussed topics in both countries, I will try to compare the prevalence and realization of this royal prerogative in both countries. After describing and evaluating the events of the constitutional crises at the beginning of the 20th century in both countries I also hope to have a more sophisticated picture on the mechanism of instrumentalization of the image of the British parliamentarism in Hungary.