Petru Groza - The Groza Cabinets

The Groza Cabinets

To confirm Groza's installment as the Romanian premier, elections were held on November 19, 1946 (see Romanian general election, 1946). Although the coalition to which the Ploughmen's Front belonged failed to win a majority in the Grand National Assembly, the communists arranged for a fraudulent count of the votes cast in the elections, thereby "confirming" Groza as premier, despite protests by the United States and the United Kingdom who held that, pursuant to the agreements reached at the Yalta Conference in 1945, only "interim governmental authorities broadly representative of the population", should be supported by the major powers. As a result, Groza's government was permanently estranged from the United States and Great Britain, who nominally supported the waning influence of the monarchist forces under King Michael I.

Despite the annoyance of the two powers, the communists constituted only a minority in Groza's cabinet and were outnumbered by the representatives of bourgeois Romanian political parties. The leading figures in the Romanian Communist Party, Pauker and Gheorghiu-Dej, wanted the Groza government to preserve the façade of a coalition government and thus enable the communist party to win the confidence of the masses, since right after the Second World War the communists enjoyed very little political support. For this reason top communist figures like Pauker and Gheorghiu-Dej did not join Groza's cabinet. They planned to impose a communist regime under the veil of the existing coalition government. By conflating the successes of the regime with their Party, Pauker and Gheorghiu-Dej hoped to win support for the party and lay the foundations for an overtly communist regime, a goal they accomplished in 1952. Accordingly Groza maintained the illusion of a coalition government, appointing members of diverse political organizations to his cabinet and formulating his government's short-term goals in broad, non-ideological terms. He stated at a cabinet meeting on March 7, 1945, for example, that the government sought to guarantee safety and order for the population, implement desired land reform policies, and focus on a "swift cleanup" of the state bureaucracy and immediate prosecution of war criminals, i.e. officials of the Fascist wartime regime of Ion Antonescu (see Romania during World War II and Romanian People's Tribunals).