Abstract

Parties and Politics in Rumania

Before the war Romania divided her political life between two parties, the Conservative and the Liberal. The Conservative Party represented the latifundiary landlords and the Liberals the upper and lower middle classes and the economic and financial institutions which they created. It has been asserted that liberalism in Romania has had no political reality. Through the dissemination of liberal ideas the Liberal Party was the master builder of the Romanian civilization of the second half of the nineteenth century, continuing its progressive activity down to 1914. Then came the World War and the Russian Revolution and under their pressure two long-due and promised reforms were precipitated in Romania, a political and an economic one: universal manhood suffrage and the agrarian laws.