Mureș-Hungarian Autonomous Region
The administrative reform implemented in Romania at the end of 1960 also had a significant impact on the Hungarian Autonomous Region. The province was renamed Mureș-Hungarian Autonomous Region (Regiunea Mureș-Autonomă Maghiară, M-HAR), several Romanian-majority raions of Central Transylvania were added to its territory, while the former Trei Scaune region with Hungarian-majority was decoupled. The population of the M-HAR thus increased to over 800 000, but the proportion of Hungarians decreased to 61%. The changes also extended to the leadership of the region: in 1961, the Romanian Iosif Banc was appointed as first secretary in place of Lajos Csupor, a Romanian was appointed as head of the People’s Council, and Hungarians were increasingly marginalised in political and economic positions. While the character of the M-HAR remained partly Hungarian, parallel Romanian structures were established in the cultural and educational spheres, the autonomy of Hungarian institutions was limited, and the Romanianisation of the regional centre, Târgu Mures, continued. The end of M-HAR coincided with the consolidation of power of Nicolae Ceaușescu, the first secretary of the Romanian Communist Party since 1965. The new administrative division replaced the regions with counties. The plan for a “large Szekler county” was eventually replaced by two smaller, but also Hungarian-majority counties and a partly Hungarian county, which was approved in February 1968. This abolished the institutional framework of the – albeit partial and formal – regional autonomy of Szeklerland. Decades later, after the 1989 turnaround, this framework also appeared in the Romanian discourse against the revived Transylvanian and Szekler autonomy aspirations. In various nationalist publicists and parliamentary speeches, it was referred to as an instrument of communist dictatorship and Soviet intervention, and as a ground for discrimination against the local Romanians.