Pushing Forward in Europe and Beyond

Immediately after my resignation as Prime Minister on 6 March 1992, I moved to the headquarters of the EPP in Brussels. I dedicated myself entirely to the organisation of the Party. Over the next two years — from March 1992 to April 1994 — I undertook ninety-one trips, a physically exhausting task, to reorganise and represent Christian Democracy. I led numerous fact-fnding missions in search of partners. A journalist described me then as “the traveller for democracy”.

Christian Democracy remained unknown for a long time in Central and Eastern Europe, although Christian-Social parties represented a considerable part of the political landscape in Central Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth century. The origin of these parties in Czechoslovakia and Slovenia dates back to the 1890s. In Hungary the frst Christian-Social political formations appear in 1885, and in 1894 the Christian People's Party was founded. As of 1898 and 1901 the Christian-Social—inspired Poles, then under Austrian and German rule, assembled as political parties.