A continuum of dictatorships: Hybrid totalitarian experiments in Romania, 1937-44

In December 1937, the national general elections in Romania produced an inconclusive result: for the first time in the country’s inter-war history, no political party managed to reach the electoral threshold of 40 per cent of the total number of votes in order to benefit from the electoral bonus awarding the majority of seats in the parliament, as stipulated by the 1926 law. Instead, the result confirmed two general trends already evident in the 1933 elections: the gradual erosion of popular support for the great bourgeois-democratic parties, the National Liberal Party (PNL — Partidul Naţional Liberal) and the National Peasants’ Party (PNT — Partidul Naţional Ţărănesc) on the one hand, and the rising tide of new nationalist parties, among which the most important were the fascist Legion of Archangel Michael and the conservative-right National-Christian Party (PNC — Partidul Naţional Creştin) on the other. To be sure, although party politics in Romania was clearly recast as a confrontation between bourgeois-democratic and radical parties, the electoral balance was still overwhelmingly in favour of the former, with the PNL obtaining 35.92 per cent of the vote, the dissident liberal faction led by Gheorghe Brătianu 3.89 per cent and the PNT 20.40 per cent. At the same time, the radical nationalist pole was, however, not only particularly strong — with a record of 15.53 per cent of the votes for the All for the Fatherland Party (representing the Legion) and 9.15 per cent for the PNC — but also on the offensive.1