as chairman of the Socialist Party. Between 1990 and 1995, he was a member of the Governing Board of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). He also functioned as one of the vice presidents of the Socialist International from 1996 to 2003. Horn led the Socialists to a comprehensive victory in the 1994 parliamentary election. The MSZP leaped from a paltry 33 seats in 1990 to 209, at the time the second-most that a Hungarian party has ever won in a free election. The size of the MSZP landslide took even Horn by surprise. Although the Socialists had more than enough seats to govern alone, Horn suspected he'd have trouble getting needed reforms past his own party's left wing. He also wanted to allay concerns both inside and outside Hungary of a former Communist party winning an absolute majority. With this in mind, he went into coalition with the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats, giving him a two-thirds majority. A few days before election day, Horn and his convoy suffered a major car accident between Emőd and Nyékládháza on the way back from a campaign closing event from Miskolc; Horn suffered a cervical fracture and was forced to wear a halo brace for months. In 1995, Horn's government enacted the "Bokros package", a major austerity program. This was a difficult decision for a social democratic party, and Horn had to expend considerable effort to get most of his party to agree to it. Although Horn relinquished leadership of the party after the Socialists lost the 1998 election to Viktor Orbán and Fidesz, he was for a long time considered to have considerable influence in the party, partly because of his personal popularity among elderly voters. However, after 2002 he went into semi-retirement. The Medgyessy Cabinet appointed him Special Rapporteur for the European Union. He received second place in the election list of the MSZP during the 2004 European Parliament election in Hungary, however Horn stated before the election that would not become an MEP. Horn has received several awards for his achievements in foreign relations, among others the Charlemagne Award of the city of Aachen in 1990. He did not, however, get the Civil Division of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary in 2007, suggested by Ferenc Gyurcsány, as it was refused by Hungarian President László Sólyom, who explicitly stated Horn's views on the 1956 revolution