Alexandru Vaida-Voevod - in Romania

In Romania

Vaida-Voevod joined the Romanian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, and was one of its most prominent members throughout the negotiations, as an organizer of press campaigns.

The elections of November 1919 were successful for his party, and he replaced the National Liberal Ion I. C. Brătianu as Prime Minister and Nicolae Mişu as Foreign Minister. He secured the new borders by ordering Romanian troops to fight off the Hungarian Soviet Republic. However, his radical approach toward the land reforms made King Ferdinand dissolve his government in March 1920, to be replaced by one formed by General Alexandru Averescu's People's Party (a populist movement that had attracted Brătianu's conditional support). Vaida-Voevod's party emerged as the National Peasants' Party in 1926, and he served as its leader.

Nonetheless, the problems posed by his new cabinets (in 1932 and 1933) - the Legionary Movement's intimidation of the political scene, and Vaida-Voevod's own Anti-semitism (which began to manifest itself in measures of repression encouraged by the Legionaries), led to a split between the Prime Minister and his Party. His second government fell because of Armand Călinescu, who was a staunch opponent of the Legionary Movement.

He began opening up to Fascism and Nazism, and created his own movement, the Romanian Front, which survived through the increasingly authoritarian regime of Carol II, the National Legionary State, and most of World War II, officially ending around 1944. Nevertheless, the party never elluded obscurity in front of competition from the Legionaries, and its members were victims of the repression carried out by the communist regime after 1948. Vaida-Voevod was arrested on March 24, 1945. In 1946, he was put under house arrest in Sibiu, where he spent the remainder of his life.