Hungarians voted massively in favour of joining NATO yesterday, giving an unexpectedly strong endorsement to the government's plan to enter the Western military alliance. With just over 99 per cent of the vote tallied, the National Election Centre's Internet web page showed 3,318,436, or 85.34 per cent, in favour of joining NATO and 570,083, or 14.66 per cent, opposed.
"This is a fantastic result, this shows the will of the people," the Prime Minister, Mr Gyula Horn, told reporters at the National Election Centre.
Late figures showed just under 50 per cent of the electorate participated in the vote which the government viewed as critical to its strategy to reorient this formerly communist country to the Western bloc.
"The message of this result to the world is that NATO accession is not the cause of the government but of the people," the Foreign Minister, Mr Laszlo Kovacs, one of the chief architects of Hungary's pro-European and pro-NATO strategy, said.
For the referendum to be valid either half the eight million eligible voters had to show up, or at least two million votes had to be cast for or against NATO membership.
But the "yes" vote dominated from the beginning of vote counting and the outcome was never in doubt.
Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic have been invited to join NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) in a first round of expansion into the former Soviet bloc in 1999. Hungary alone of the three chose to hold a referendum on the issue.
Mr Kovacs said earlier that if the referendum were positive, Hungary could send a letter of intent to NATO today indicating its intention to join the alliance.
Opponents of Hungary's joining NATO, including some diehard communist groups and environmental activists and pacifist groups, had argued that membership would be too costly and neutrality was a better and cheaper alternative.
But a sampling of people going to the polls in Budapest found that most were not accepting that argument.
"I'm for it because it gives us security," said Mr Karoly Friedrich (79).
"We are a very small country and there are many quarrels around us, in Serbia and in Romania, so it is better to belong to a bigger family," Mr Friedrich said.
"Belonging somewhere means security for the country and that's important even if it is expensive," said a young woman casting her ballot.
President Arpad Goncz, who voted in a village near Lake Balaton, west of Budapest, said he thought some people had voted "no" because the generation of people like himself, who were involved in the 1956 uprising against Soviet rule, wanted neutrality.
"But NATO membership will practically exclude the chance of a great war," he told a television interviewer.