Iuliu Maniu

Iuliu Maniu

Iuliu Maniu ( debate ^{? / I} ; * January 8, 1873 in Bădăcin , in today's Sălaj County ; † February 5, 1953 in Sighetu Marmației , Maramureș County ) was a Romanian politician .

Career

Maniu was born in Transylvania , then still part of Austria-Hungary , as a member of the Romanian Greek Catholic Church . After studying law in Cluj-Napoca and Budapest and completing his doctorate in law in Vienna , he worked as a lawyer for the United Archdiocese of Făgăraş and Alba Iulia in Blaj .

In 1896 he was elected to the presidium of the "National Party of Romanians" (Partidul Național Român) , which was active in the Hungarian half of the Danube Monarchy . In 1906 he was elected to the Hungarian parliament for this party. There he quickly became the spokesman for the parliamentary arm of the Romanian national movement. After the end of the First World War and the collapse of the Kuk monarchy , the demand for Transylvania to join Romania was realized. On December 2, 1918 he was elected President of the Council of Transylvania, Banat and the Romanian Provinces in Hungary in Sibiu. This position corresponded to that of a governor and also included the function of minister of the interior.

In 1926, the National Party of Romanians, of which Maniu had become chairman, joined the Peasant Party from the Romanian Old Reich to form the National and Peasant Party ( Partidul Național-Țărănesc ), which opposed the National Liberal Party internally and the one externally Looking for reference to France.

On December 12, 1928, the PNȚ won a clear election, whereupon Maniu became prime minister. One focus of his government was the dismantling of trade barriers, whereby he promoted the Romanian grain export and thus its peasant base as well as foreign investments and thus the industrial development of the country. However, the global economic crisis largely destroyed these efforts. Iuliu Maniu advocated the return of King Charles II on June 6, 1930. When the latter, contrary to a promise made by the government, did not bring his lover Magda Lupescu to court, but instead let her escape abroad, Maniu resigned on October 6, 1930. In 1932 and 1933 he was once again Prime Minister for a short time. Afterwards he held several ministerial posts for a short period until World War II , but also led the opposition. The relationship with Charles II remained strained.

Before the parliamentary elections in December 1937 he reached an understanding with Corneliu Zelea Codreanu , the leader of the fascist party and movement Iron Guard, on good cooperation and repeatedly expressed his sympathy for Codreanu. Maniu's ethnic nationalism, despite his influential position in the interwar period, was constrained by a political elite committed to the law and democratic order.

Maniu protested bitterly against the Second Vienna Arbitration Award , in which Romania, which had joined the Axis powers, ceded the northern part of Transylvania to Hungary. Maniu also opposed Romania's entry into the war on November 23, 1940, as well as the continuation of the struggle after the territories that the Soviet Union had annexed the year before had been recaptured in 1941. He later took part in negotiations that were to lead to a ceasefire with the Allies.

In 1944 Maniu was involved in the establishment of a shadow government that took power on August 23, 1944 after Ion Antonescu's overthrow . He gave up his ministerial office in November that year, as the Soviet Union was gaining ever greater influence over the government. On March 6, 1945, his Peasant Party was also expelled from the government, whereby the Soviet Union finally gained political control over Romania. Until 1947, the former prime minister repeatedly published articles in western media criticizing violations of the law and election fraud by the Soviets and their allies in Romania. On July 19, 1947, his immunity as a MP was lifted and he was arrested. On November 11, 1947, he was sentenced to life-long forced labor, which was converted to life imprisonment for reasons of age. He died in captivity in 1953.

Web links

Commons : Iuliu Maniu  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Jiulius Maniu in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)
• Newspaper article about Iuliu Maniu in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ forum.druckeria.ro ( Memento of the original from October 23, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ↑ Vladimir Solonari: Purifying the Nation. Population Exchange and Ethnic Cleansing in Nazi-Allied Romania. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 2010, pp. 19f