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COPYRIGHT 2005 East European Quarterly
Question: Why does the National Christian Democrat Peasant Party hot reconstruct itself?
Answer: Because it did not yet destroy itself completely. (Romanian political joke)
Among Romanian parties, the National Christian Democrat Peasant Party (NCDPP) is the only one that moved from the position of the largest partner of a ruling coalition to that of an outside-Parliament party commanding the allegiance of less than five percent of the electorate. Today few enthusiasts believe that the NCDPP tan make a comeback and win parliamentary representation in the upcoming 2004 general elections. Most Romanians dismiss the party as insignificant and forever relinquished to the fringes of political life. It was not long ago, however, that the Christian Democrats commanded considerable leverage on governmental structures at all levels. This article chronicles the rise and fall of the NCDPP, presenting the individuals who atone time or another represented the party, and discussing the party's most important policies and political choices.
The NCDPP is by no means an exceptional party when it comes to programmatic goals and historical legacy. Together with the National Liberal Party and the Social Democrat Party, it is one of three 'historical' parties active in pre-communist Romania, banned by the communist authorities, and resurrected after the December 1989 anticommunist revolution. (1) It is one of Romania's many center-right parties and coalitions with an anticommunist, pro-Western and pro-democratic political platform. Some of these electoral coalitions--including the Democratic Convention of Romania--were formed by the NCDPP itself. The NCDPP is also the largest Christian Democrat party in Romania, and one of eleven Eastern European parties affiliated to the Christian Democrat International. Together with the Polish Electoral Alliance Solidarity of the Right, the Romanian NCDPP is the only Eastern European Christian Democrat party without parliamentary representation at the beginning of the new century.
The Beginnings (1990-1996)
The NCDPP registered on 8 January 1990, days after the collapse of Ceausescu regime. The party presented itself as the revived pre-communist National Peasant Party, formed in September 1926 through the fusion of the National Party and the Peasant Party. The National Party emerged in 1869 in Transylvania and, under Iuliu Maniu's leadership, became instrumental in the 1918 union of Transylvania and the Romanian kingdom. Maniu resigned when King Carol II refused to sever ties with his mistress Elena Lupescu. Formed in 1895 in the Arges county, the Peasant Party reemerged a quarter of a century later under the leadership of teacher Ion Mihalache. The pivotal political act that helped the party gain a significant following was the 1918-1921 land reform, the most extensive expropriation in inter-war Europe that turned over 40 percent of all arable land to peasants and destroyed the political and economic power of the landowning elite. The reform aimed not so much to improve the social and economic situation of the peasants, who failed to turn into more efficient farmers as a result, but to prevent them from becoming political radicals. Land reform and the 1923 constitution providing for universal male suffrage pacified the peasants, and assured that the acquiescent Peasant Party rather than the rising extremist parties enlisted their vote. The political confusion following the 1927 deaths of King Ferdinand and Liberal leader Bratianu allowed the National Peasant Party to win the 1928 election, the only inter-war poll considered free of political manipulation. For the next five years, the party moved in and out of government, ruling the country alternatively with the Liberals. Accountable democracy was short lived after 1930, when King Carol II became Romania's dominant figure, first manipulating the political process, and then establishing a royal dictatorship.
After communist authorities banned the party in the wake of the November 1946 elections, most of its leaders were jailed, and both Maniu and Mihalache died in prison. The decapitated formation continued its illegal existence throughout the 1947-1989 period under the leadership of Comeliu Coposu. That was no easy task, as communist Romania allowed no opposition and refused to recognize alternate political parties. Born in May 1914 in the family of a Greek Catholic priest residing in the Transylvanian Salaj county, Coposu joined the party at the age of 19. A law graduate, he acted as Maniu's personal secretary from 1937 to 1947, a political apprenticeship that came in handy when Coposu decided to revive the party. In 1947, he was accused of "high treason against the working classes" and was sentenced to life in prison, not before waiting eight years for his trial to take place. Coposu was freed in 1964 as part of an amnesty but the communist secret police continued to monitor his movements closely. Even so, in 1987 at the height of the communist dictatorship he secretly arranged for the underground National Peasant Party to join the Christian Democrat International. The affiliation offered international recognition, but was more formal than substantial as the party remained closer to the old policies of the interwar National Peasant Party than to modern definitions of Christian Democracy. (2) During its first years of existence, the NCDPP benefited tremendously from Coposu's moral standing, organizational skills and political capital. While other Romanian politicians struggled to hide past collaboration with communist authorities and the crass opportunism that animated their political involvement, Coposu was respected for his moral rectitude and personal sacrifice. While other politicians tried to secure undeserved state positions at any cost, Coposu let his colleagues take formal responsibility as Parliament or committee leaders. Coposu's mark on the party was indelible, but not entirely beneficial. By refusing to name a successor he exposed the party to factionalism. By supporting outsiders for top party and state offices he weakened the Christian Democrats' self-confidence. By making it so dependent on the personality of its leader, Coposu exposed the party to the threat of personalism, nepotism and cronyism. Unfortunately, other party leaders were far less virtuous, and had no qualms to misuse and abuse the unchecked power that came with the office.
The new party's claim to represent the interwar National Peasant Party was supported by its membership composition, dominated by older pre-communist activists who either were forced into exile or spent years in jail as punishment for their 'reactionary' activity. Ion Ratiu, a private entrepreneur and Cambridge University political science graduate, belonged to the former category. Nicolae Ionescu-Galbeni, Constantin ('Ticu') Dumitrescu, Gabriel Tepelea and Ion Diaconescu belonged to the latter category. They were in their seventies when communism collapsed, and unsurprisingly only a handful made meaningful political careers afterwards, though were offered seats in Parliament as early as 1990. Of those who did play a role, Ionescu-Galbeni and Tepelea established themselves as the party two-headed eminence gris, known for their endless manipulations designed to promote their personal proteges and block the careers of their opponents. Born in 1926 in Bucharest, Ionescu-Galbeni joined the National Peasant Party in 1945 and spent the 1947-1955 period in prison. After 1989 his sympathies, antipathies and suspicions had a tremendous impact on the party. Best known was his insistence that senator Dumitrescu be excluded from the party for supporting a legislative proposal calling for access to the Securitate files. The law was eventually adopted and the 2000 elections allowed investigations into the past political involvement of party electoral candidates. When Ionescu-Galbeni refused to run on the electoral party lists, many suspected him of prior collaboration with the Securitate, a fact that would have explained his refusal to support Dumitrescu. Bore in February 1916 in Transylvania, Tepelea became a National Peasant Party member in 1933 and fourteen years later ran on that party's electoral lists before spending six years in communist prisons. The imprisonment apparently did nothing to halt his professional career. Unlike other former political prisoners, Tepelea obtained a doctorate under communism and secured a coveted position in the Bucharest academia. He was a deputy during the 1990-2000 period, but never introduced more than five legislative proposals per legislature.
Because many former political prisoners composed its interim leadership, the party's platform reflected their concerns and aspirations. Leaders saw the party primarily as a vehicle for redressing their personal grievances, for gaining retribution for past injustices suffered at the hands of communist authorities, and for bringing the country back to its inter-war position. Indeed, the party asked for the Securitate to be recognized as a political police, and for communist-confiscated property to revert to its rightful owners. It constructed its identity in opposition to the Communist Party and its heir, the National Salvation Front, and claimed to be the only party capable of helping Romania break irreversibly with the communist policies and morality. Not all Christian Democrats nostalgically idealized the inter-war period, but their general direction was backward not forward, drawing inspiration from the past instead of taking into account that Romania had changed irreversibly since 1945. The party stressed what it stood against more than what it really stood for and offered no concrete and realistic proposals for national reconstruction. While its calls for moral reexamination and rejection of communist practices were justifiable, the NCDPP did not address the urgent socioeconomic problems that ordinary Romanians faced during a painful post-communist transition period, including eroded living standards, unemployment, job insecurity and high crime rates. The party was to regret this oversight.
As though an imprecise platform was not enough to compromise its chances for electoral success, the party's call for a return to inter-war institutions was more emotional than rational, as it made reference to an idealized inter-war Romania that had never been as democratic as Christian Democrats contended. Historians have repeatedly pointed to the shortcomings of the pre-communist democracy, where cronyism and clientelism were rampant, oligarchic business interests dictated public policy, nationalist parties commanded significant popular support, and the electorate felt disenfranchised and helpless in the face of a bureaucracy that overtaxed it. The inter-war political system was a parliamentary democracy only in form, as instead of being accountable to the voters the government united with the king and the civil service to dominate them, a corrupt alliance Romanians wished to forget. The project of bringing the country back to 1945 was complicated by the fact that public support for the monarchy was feeble. By the time King Michael visited his native country in 1992 he was already in his seventies, a tired man of yesterday, by and large out of touch with his country's reality. Contrary to NCDPP claims, monarchy would likely have turned into another divisive element in a country divided enough. (3)
Christian Democrats sent representatives to the first post-communist quasi-Parliament, the Provisional Council of National Unity. Formed on 1 February 1990, it included 105 Salvation Front representatives and three members for each of the 35 officially registered political parties. Its main task was planning for the first post-communist elections. The original electoral law had provided for single-member winner-take-all districts that favored the larger, better-organized Front. The uncertainties of the revolution prompted many Communist Party cells to join the Front, which benefited both numerically and organizationally. On March 14, however, the Council agreed on an electoral system of proportional representation in constituencies and no threshold requirement, thus allowing small parties to enter Parliament and fragment the party system. Even so, the odds were especially unfavorable for opposition parties. To maintain its advantage, the Front called for elections to be organized only months after new parties were allowed to register. The time for campaigning and devising electoral strategies was limited, as were the financial resources new parties could enlist. Almost effortlessly the Front won a majority of seats in the May 1990 general elections and secured its dominance over the first legislature.
The national leadership and a handful of enthusiastic local organizations prepared the Christian Democrats for the first elections, as a result of which the party gained positions in the state apparatus. Its electoral platform stressed the need for comprehensive economic reforms, as opposed to the Front's cautious proposals, but warned against the influence of foreign capital, an attitude fostered by the power of German capital in the inter-war period. Its radical agricultural reform program called for dismantling the collective farm system and granting land tenure to small farmers. The party, however, was unable to explain convincingly how its policy pronouncements would benefit ordinary citizens, and thus fell prey to the Salvation Front, which alleged that Christian Democrats wished to recreate the "wild capitalism" and deep social inequalities of pre-communist times. Instead of promoting a positive discourse, Christian Democrats attacked the Front, giving the impression that they were suited as the opposition more than the government. The party stressed abstract themes like liberty, democracy and civil society, which the population was unfamiliar with and did not comprehend. A further mistake was a slate of parliamentary candidates that included only older males lacking solid academic training and managerial experience. Christian Democrats got 2.5 percent of the national vote, and offered all their 12 deputy and one senatorial seats to former political prisoners, including Diaconescu, Ionescu-Galbeni and Tepelea.
Equally disappointing was the performance of the Christian Democrat presidential candidate, who nonetheless got slightly more than what the party garnered (4.3 percent of the vote). The party insisted on presenting its own candidate, but none of its leaders felt confident enough to run for the office. Unwilling to endorse the other candidates--Liberal leader Radu Campeanu or former communist official and Front leader Ion Iliescu--Christian Democrats accepted Ratiu's candidacy. Because he repatriated only on 24 January 1990, Ratiu missed the party's official registration and held no formal leadership position when elections took place. His political involvement abroad, willingness to run and considerable personal wealth recommended him for the job at a time when the party was ill prepared for electoral competition and lacked financial resources to mount an effective campaign. Working against Ratiu were his age and incapability to relate personally to the plight of Romanian electors, both because of his wealth and because he lived for some fifty years abroad. With their job security and living standards under threat, Romanians could not identify with Ratiu's elegant, but out-dated, bow ties. His promise to offer all female voters expensive perfumes fell on the deaf ears of Romanians who barely afforded their daily bread. While unable to fulfill his life long dream of becoming Romanian President, Ratiu used his nomination to enter the party leadership. Within a year he became party vice-president, and in 1992 he secured the Chamber of Deputies vice-presidency, which he held up to his death in early 2000. Despite his generosity and willingness to use his connections to important British political figures to promote the party, Ratiu remained an outsider to the party core. He complained that party leaders asked him with impunity to cover the costs of their travels abroad, even of those carried out for personal reasons. (4) After he set up the Cotidianul daily, and assured its independence, the NCDPP tried to assert control over the newspaper, occasionally even by force. The daily's distribution peaked to 3,000 copies in 1997, when Ion Cristoiu, an experienced journalist of nationalistic persuasion, took over.
As election results provided grounds for mild pessimism, some voices called for the leadership to be confirmed in raid-1990, but the former political prisoners' grip on the party remained tight. It was agreed for the party president and first deputy president to represent the historical regions of Transylvania and the Old Kingdom (including southern Romania and Moldova). The party elected its president (Coposu, representing Transylvania), first deputy president (Diaconescu, representing the Old Kingdom), secretary general (Barbu Pitigoi) and three vice-presidents, but the division of labor between leaders remained unspecified and as a result conflicts ensued when leaders tried to solidify their position within the party by gaining support from contending factions. Born in August 1917 in Arges, Diaconescu joined the National Peasant Party in 1936 and its leadership eight years later, but was arrested in 1947 and spent 17 years in prison, a detention period matched only by Coposu's. Diaconescu was an NCDPP deputy during the 1990-2000 period, and Chamber of Deputies president from 1996 to 2000. A deputy from 1992 to 2000, Pitigoi was bore in 1931 in Arges and, like Diaconescu, was an engineer by training, graduating from the Bucharest Polytechnic Institute in 1956 and receiving his doctorate in 1973.
Organized in late September 1991 at a time when Christian Democrats did hOt enjoy more than five percent of electoral support, the first party congress elected the leadership, and approved the statutes and the program. While Coposu remained the uncontested leader (respectfully known by friends and foes as the "Senior") and Diaconescu consolidated his position as first deputy president, vice-presidents were Ratiu and four former political prisoners, Tepelea among them. Their average age was above 70, but almost all other top party posts were held by younger men selected for their managerial skills, educational and professional background and the protection they enjoyed from senior leaders. They included Constantin ('Dudu') Ionescu, Mircea Ciumara, Radu Vasile, Remus Opris and Ulm Spineanu. In half a decade, the newcomers moved from virtual obscurity to the highest positions in the state. Seven occupied prime-ministerial, ministerial and deputy ministerial offices sometimes between 1996 and 2000. The party extended a hand to the Valea Jiului miners, who were given a warm welcome at the first congress. Delegates made donations to that disadvantaged social group, but the attempt to expand the party's social base was soon aborted as the NCDPP chose not to recruit regional trade union leaders.
The party program upheld the four principles to which Maniu and Mihalache once subscribed: enlightened patriotism, social justice, Christian morality and democracy. To them, it added a Christian Democratic commitment to "the restoration of Christian values...
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