Gyula Horn

Gyula János Horn (5 July 1932 – 19 June 2013) was a Hungarian politician who was the Prime Minister of Hungary from 1994 to 1998.

Horn was the last Communist Minister of Foreign Affairs of Hungary. He played a major role in demolishing the "Iron Curtain" for East Germans in 1989, contributing to the later unification of Germany. During his premiership, he launched the Bokros package, the biggest fiscal austerity programme in post-communist Hungary, in 1995.

Horn was born in Budapest in 1932 as the third child of transport worker Géza Horn who was of Jewish background and factory worker Anna Csörnyei. He was brought up in a Lutheran household. They lived in conditions of poverty at the so-called "Barrack" estate between Nagyicce and Sashalom. There were seven brothers in the family: filmmaker Géza (1925–1956), Károly (1930–1946), Tibor (1935), Sándor (1939), Tamás (1942) and Dénes (1944).

After the German occupation of Hungary, his father was kidnapped by the Gestapo due to communist activities in 1944 and never returned. Gyula Horn's niece is Szófia Havas (b. Szófia Horn, 1955), Member of Parliament between 2006 and 2010, whose father Géza, Jr. was killed under unclear circumstances during the 1956 revolution.

He first studied in a lower technicians' school in Hungary. He graduated from the Rostov-on-Don College of Economics and Finance in 1954. He finished the political academy of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (MSZMP) in 1970. He received Candidate of Economic Sciences in 1977.

He married statistician Anna Király in February 1956 and had two children: Anna (1956) and Gyula, Jr. (1969).

In 1954 Horn joined the Hungarian communist party, then called the Hungarian Working People's Party (MDP). In November 1956, he helped reorganize the MDP into the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (MSZMP), which under the leadership of János Kádár crushed the 1956 Hungarian revolution against Soviet occupation and communist rule.

Horn worked in the Ministry of Finance from 1954 to 1959. He got a job in the Foreign Ministry in 1959, first as an official in the independent Soviet department. In the 1960s he was a diplomat in the Hungarian embassies in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.