Case Study: Hungary In Hungary, intellectuals and environmental activists led the opposition that combined environmental questions,

worry about the treatment of Hungarians in Romania and a deep anger about the regimes handling of the 1956 revolt. The Danube Circle formed in 1984, was the first organisation to challenge the regimes monopoly power. The DC was created to fight the construction of a massive dam between Hungary and Czechoslovakia arguing it would create an environmental disaster and displace thousands of Hungarians. Opponents of the regime soon joined the environmental protest and by 1988 he DC had around 10,000 followers who actively demonstrated on the streets of Budapest. Hungary had not seen public protests on this scale since 1956. Throughout the 1980s, students and other opponents of the regime staged small-scale public commemorations on three important dates. March 15 was the Independence Day; June 16 was the anniversary of Imre Nagys execution and October 30s was the anniversary of the start of the 1956 uprising. By the fall of 1988, public pressure to recognise these dates led to the recognition of March 15th and the Party agreed to allow the formation of opposition parties, mistakenly believing that the Communist Party was popular enough to survive. Intellectuals and students led the three prime parties in contrast to the Polish worker led movement. The growing support of these led to the rehabilitation of several leaders including Nagy. In the face of strong public sympathy for a Hungary free from Communist control, the government declared Hungary a republic in October 1989, on the anniversary of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. In May 1990, the first free democratic elections took place effectively ending the Communist era. The peaceful collapse of the communist system in 1989 was due to the policies of Gorbachev, which made clear that the Soviet Union would not prop by force communist systems in Eastern Europe. Secondly, discontent with the regime in Hungary increased during the 1980s due to growing economic difficulties.