The Ploughmen's Front was a Romanian left-wing agrarian-inspired political organisation of ploughmen, founded at Deva in 1933 and led by Petru Groza. At its peak in 1946, the Front had over 1 million members.
History
Begun in Hunedoara County, it quickly spread into the Banat, and then into the other regions of Romania. Groza, who had been a minister in Alexandru Averescu's People's Party cabinet, aimed to improve the situation of the peasantry, calling for a social security program in the countryside and tax reform favourable to small holdings. The group was also republican in ambitions, probably from the moment it was created. In 1935, the organisation aligned itself with the outlawed Romanian Communist Party, an agreement inspired by the StalinistPopular Front doctrine and signed in Ţebea. During this period, the Ploughmen's Front never obtained more than 0.30% of the vote. Outlawed together with all parties in 1938, through a law passed by the authoritarian regime of King Carol II, it remained active in clandestinity during the dictatorial rule of Ion Antonescu, and surfaced after its fall in 1944 and the start of Sovietascendancy and influence. In October of that year, it joined other the PCR-led National Democratic Front, alongside the Union of Patriots, the Union of Hungarian Workers, the Socialist Peasants' Party, and the Romanian Social Democratic Party. In February 1945, although represented inside the Nicolae Rădescu cabinet it took part in violent incidents that led to its fall. Groza, who was first considered for high political office in late 1944, led the third cabinet after the fall of Antonescu ; while the government was maneuvered by the PCR, the Ploughmen's Front did hold the Ministry of Agriculture and Royal Domains, which was assigned to Romulus Zăroni, and that of Culture and Arts, which was assigned to Mihai Ralea. In late 1947, Stanciu Stoian became another one of the party's leading members to be presiding over a ministry — that of Religious Affairs; additionally, Octav Liveazeanu became head on the Information Ministry. The party ran on a single platform with the PCR during the 1946 general election, which the Groza cabinet won through large-scale electoral fraud, and had PCR activists such as Constantin Agiu among its nominal members. It thus played an active part in the proceedings leading to the creation of Communist Romania. At the time, PCR leaders began using Antonescu's 1943 crackdown on the Front as an instrument in intra-party fights: after General Secretary Gheorghiu-Dej had ordered his predecessor Ştefan Foriş to be abducted and held in secrecy, it was alleged that Foriş' collaborator Remus Koffler had functioned as an agent for the former secret service, and that he had engineered Groza's arrest. Nevertheless, relations between the Front and Communists were tested at times: after its first congress, Groza's party called for the preservation of small, privately owned, agricultural plots and voluntary cooperative farming instead of the collectivization advocated by the PCR; in the period known as the "Royal strike", Groza, urged on by Zăroni and Mihail Ghelmegeanu, objected to Soviet pressures on the monarch and even threatened Vasile Luca that he would withdraw support for the PCR. Eventually, the Front gave in to Communist demands. In July 1947, the Front was joined by Nicolae D. Cornăţeanu and other members of the defunct National Union for Work and Reconstruction, and, in 1948, it absorbed the National Peasants' Party–Alexandrescu. The Ploughmen's Front ceased to exist when it dissolved itself in 1953. According to the 1991 testimony of former PCR leader Gheorghe Apostol, the latter action was instigated by the main party; he also indicated that, in retrospect, Gheorghiu-Dej had found such measures taken against pluralism to be regrettable.
3 FDP members in 1952: Romanian Workers Party and independent affiliates, Ploughmen's Front, Hungarian People's Union and Jewish Democratic Committee. Distribution of mandates is unclear.
