National Agrarian Party Partidul Național-Agrar | |
|---|---|
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| Abbreviation | PNA |
| President | Octavian Goga |
| Founded | April 10, 1932 |
| Dissolved | July 14, 1935 |
| Split from | People's Party |
| Succeeded by | National Christian Party National Agrarian Party (Valjean faction) Union of National Awareness (from 1938) |
| Newspaper | Țara Noastră |
| Ideology | |
| Political position | Right-wing to far-right |
| National affiliation | Antirevisionist League (1933) |
| Slogan | Dumnezeu, Patrie, Rege ("God, Fatherland, King") Rod mult, bun și cu preț ("More, better, valuable bearings") |
The National Agrarian Party (Romanian: Partidul Național-Agrar or Partidul Național-Agrarian, PNA) was a right-wing agrarian party active in Romania during the early 1930s. Established and led by poet Octavian Goga, it was originally a schism from the more moderate People's Party, espousing agrarianism in combination with national conservatism, monarchism, antisemitism, and Germanophilia; Goga was also positively impressed by fascism, but there is disagreement in the scholarly community as to whether the PNA was itself fascist. Its antisemitic rhetoric was also contrasted by the PNA's acceptance of some Jewish members, including Tudor Vianu and Henric Streitman. The group was generally suspicious of Romania's other ethnic minorities, but in practice accepted members and external collaborators of many ethnic backgrounds, such as the Gagauz Dumitru Topciu and the Romani Gheorghe A. Lăzăreanu-Lăzurică.
The PNA existed as a venue for supporting the authoritarian King, Carol II, whose political program it partly enacted. The National Agrarianist economic and social proposals included the protection of smallholders, with echoes of dirigisme and promises of debt relief. It was strongly opposed to the more left-wing National Peasants' Party, describing it as corrupt and denouncing its autonomist-regionalist tendencies. In Parliament, PNA representatives, largely inherited from the People's Party, collaborated mostly with two other anti-establishment groups: the Georgist Liberals and the Lupist Peasantists. The PNA was able to absorb some National Peasantist sections, primarily in Bucharest and Transylvania.
The PNA registered its best result nationally in the December 1933 election, when it took 4.1% of the vote. Despite its relative insignificance, its leader Goga was often perceived as a likely contender for the office of Prime Minister. The PNA had contacts in Nazi Germany, who regarded it as a political ally. While cautious about the Nazis' take on international politics, Goga traveled to Berlin in late 1933, meeting Adolf Hitler and returning as an enthusiastic admirer. Moving closer to the far-right and abandoning his own membership in the Romanian Freemasonry, Goga sought alliances with the more radical movements. The PNA tried but failed to unite with the Iron Guard and the Romanian Front, finally merging with the slightly more powerful National-Christian Defense League in July 1935.
The resulting National Christian Party (PNC) offered a venue for conservative antisemites with fascist sympathies, but was rejected by PNA moderates, as well as by some of the League's radicals. A splinter group, led by Ion Al. Vasilescu-Valjean and centered on Romanați County, continued to call itself PNA, surviving to December 1937. Briefly serving as Prime Minister, Goga was asked to step down by Carol II, whose 1938 Constitution introduced a royal dictatorship. Goga died soon after; although the PNC was not repressed under the new regime, it suffered an internal crisis, with PNA men establishing a Union of National Awareness. Both it and other PNC factions were then absorbed by Carol's National Renaissance Front.