The Parliamentary Elite of the Romanian National Party (1919-1926)
The Parliamentary Elite of the Romanian National Party (1919-1926)

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of this study is to research the social structure of the Romanian National Party’s parliamentary elite which was elected on the first parliamentary elections from Great Romania: 1919, 1920, 1922 and 1926. The unification of Transylvania, Bukovina and Bessarabia with Romania had as an immediate consequence the reunification of the party system with the political formations that activated in these provinces: the Romanian National Party, the Social Democrat Party, the Democrat Party of Unification and the Peasant’s Party from Bessarabia. Among these, the National Party was, no doubt, the strongest, because it was the only one present on the Romanian political stage for a longer time. Regarding the social structure of the party, the specific historical circumstances in which the R.N.P. developed offered it a very heterogeneous physiognomy which included the representatives of all social ranks of the population, starting with peasantry and ending with bourgeoisies. Its leaders belonged to the richest and middle ranks of society, without including any peasant, thus its economic interests being similar with those of the National Liberal Party. Still, from this point of view, the R.N.P. had a wider social foundation than the National Liberal Party. The greatest part of the Romanian National Party parliamentarians, both deputies and senators, – the elite of this party – were lawyers, followed by priests and teachers (see table 3). These three social categories were representative for the party within the period we studied.

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