page_title: Romanian Front
section_title: Stagnation
hierarchical_section_title: Romanian Front / History / Stagnation
caption_attribution_description: English: Nameplate of the Romanian nationalist newspaper, Gazeta Transilvaniei, Issue 46 (June 14), 1936; featuring the electoral symbol of Alexandru Vaida-Voevod's Romanian Front. The masthead also urges Romanians to boycott the "Judaeo-communist newspapers Dimineața, Adevărul, Zorile [and] Lupta".
context_page_description: The Romanian Front was a moderate fascist party created in Romania in 1935. Led by former Prime Minister Alexandru Vaida-Voevod, it originated as a right-wing splinter group from the mainstream National Peasants' Party. While in power, Vaida had an ambiguous approach to the Iron Guard, and constructed his own radical ideology; the FR had a generally xenophobic program of positive discrimination, being implicitly antisemitic. It was subsumed to the policies of King Carol II, maneuvering between the mainstream National Liberals, the PNȚ's left-wing, and the more radically fascist Guardists. Vaida tried to compete with the former two and appease the latter, assuming fascist trappings such as the black-shirted uniform. Like the Guard, he supported aligning Romania with the Axis powers, though he also hoped to obtain their guarantees for Greater Romania's borders. The FR's lower echelons included Viorel Tilea and other opponents of Vaida's approach, who believed in Romania's attachments to the League of Nations and the Little Entente.
context_section_description: A reshuffled Tătărescu government took over in mid-1936. The Front still held rallies, boasting that 20,000 affiliates heard Ioanițescu speaking at Galați in March. However, according to the regional journal Viața Ardealului, summer 1936 was a "period of stagnation" for the FR and "the nationalist current as a whole". The Front was still "sure of its destiny", but "organizing in depth" and keeping secret about it. Vaida and Angelescu now advanced the notion of a PNȚ–FR reconciliation, arguing that it could successfully bring down the PNL cabinet. One other option, advanced by Carol and journalist Pamfil Șeicaru, was for the FR to join efforts with the breakaway Radical Peasants' Party.
  Meanwhile, revelations about German re-armament, pushed the FR closer to Nazism. During March 1936, Vaida declared that the League of Nations was powerless against the "victorious discipline" of the Italian Empire and the Hitlerian "unity of sentiment and willpower". In June, following the Rhineland crisis, L'Humanité reported that the "racist parties" (the Front, the Iron Guard and the PNC) staged a march outside the French embassy in Bucharest, with chants of "Long live Hitler!" With this, Vaida declared that Germany was marching toward realizing the Anschluss, pleading for France to discard its Popular Front and rejoin the "nationalist" camp. Speaking at Oradea in October, he saluted both Axis powers. According to Vaida, the Locarno Treaties were naturally obsolete, and Germany was right to ignore them; however, he cautioned that the borders of Greater Romania needed to be guaranteed by both Germany and France.
  Vaida's stance was ridiculed by the PNȚ youth: in a September communique, it noted that Vaida, "that old fascist parrot", was silent on the issue of Italian support for Hungarian irredentism, though this would have entailed the loss of Transylvania to Hungary. From the PNȚ's left, Nicolae L. Lupu described the FR as stoking "racial [and] Germanophile violence"; in response, the FR played down such incidents as "the excesses of certain youths", while noting brawls started by the PNȚ's own Voinici. In November, as Benito Mussolini expressed full support for a Hungarian expansion, Vaida joined other Romanian politicians in voicing his indignation. He and his party sought to tone down the "hysteria", informing their partisans that Mussolini would never risk going to war over Hungarian demands in Transylvania. Vaidists pledged themselves to combat propaganda by the Hungarian Unity Party, arguing that it "falsifies the most obvious truths". The FR also noted that Mihalache's anti-revisionism was a diversion used by communist and Jewish infiltrators.
  On September 4, the FR and PNC had agreed on another collaboration, and presented a single list for the local elections of that year. Brătianu's Georgist Liberal Party also collaborated with the two parties in places such as Brașov; though invited to join this "purely Romanian list", the PNȚ declined. In Ilfov County, the two-party list was headed by Ioanițescu, with the PNC man Stan Ghițescu taking the second eligible seat. The Front's registered logo, "two concentric circles and a dot", doubled as the alliance symbol. Called "target" or "wheel" in party documents, this drawing symbolized Greater Romania as an outside circle, and, within, "the belt strap tightening around The Black Dot, namely the xenophile". According to Gazeta Transilvaniei, the symbolism was poorly understood by illiterate sympathizers, who mistakenly voted with the PNȚ's circle (which had been intensely popularized by Ioanițescu before his defection).
caption: Nameplate of Gazeta Transilvaniei on June 14, 1936, with FR logo and a condemnation of the "Judaeo-communist" press, including Adevărul
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