National Agrarian Party (Romania)

The National Agrarian Party (Romanian: Partidul Național Agrar) was a right-wing agrarian political party active in Romania during the early 1930s.

The party emerged in 1932 following a split in the People's Party and in response to the conversion of its founder the poet Octavian Goga to anti-Semitism.^[1] Goga had managed to convince much of the membership of General Alexandru Averescu's party to follow him into the new group.^[2]

Under the Goga's leadership the National Agrarian Party espoused an authoritarian nationalist ideology.^[3] It adopted "Christ! King! Fatherland!" as its slogan, a rallying cry already associated with Goga before the party's formation.^[4]

In July 1935 the group merged with A. C. Cuza's National-Christian Defense League to form the National Christian Party, a hard-line Anti-Semitic group that sought to challenge the Iron Guard whilst remaining close to more mainstream conservative forces.^[5] Pressure for this move had come from the office of Alfred Rosenberg in Nazi Germany, where a stronger anti-Semitic party in Romania was seen as desirable.^[6]

References

1. William Brustein, Roots of Hate: Anti-Semitism in Europe Before the Holocaust, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 157
2. Keith Hitchins, Rumania: 1866-1947, Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 403-4
3. Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism 1914-45, London: Routledge, 2001, p. 279
4. Richard S. Levy, Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution, Volume 2, ABC-CLIO, 2005, p. 279
5. Payne, A History of Fascism, p. 284
6. Levy, Antisemitism, p. 158