Journal Analele Banatului N.S. Archaeology-History

Marian-Alin Dudoi

The Romanian election of 1946 in the Swedish press

Jan. 1, 2022

Abstract

The study analyses how the Swedish press presented the Romanian election of November 19, 1946. The research was undertaken at the Diplomatic Archives of the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Bucharest). The Groza Government, imposed by the Soviets as the Red Army had occupied the country, on March 6th, 1945 rejected the United States and Great Britain’s protests concerning the impossibility of the opposition parties to have the same conditions as the government’s coalition of parties on the grounds that Anglo-Saxon powers’ protests affected the national sovereignty of Romania, although the two powers and the Soviet Union represented the United Nations in defeated Romania, being empowered to implement the armistice convention (September 1944 to September 1947). With few exceptions, the Swedish press, under the influence of Liberal or Conservative ideologies, presented the real faces of the electoral campaign under the influence of the denial of freedom (terror, violence and clashes of the government’s hooligans with the opposition sympathizers in order to determine the latter to abandon the electoral meetings) and censorship. After the election, almost the entire Swedish press presented the unsuccessful protests of the British and the United States Governments and the opposition parties concerning the cancellation of the elections due to massive electoral fraud, despite the allegations of Ny Dag, the newspaper of the Swedish Communist Party, and few leftist newspapers that the election was democratic, only the opposition parties used the violence, and demonstrated the wish of Romanian people to reject Fascism, antisemitism and white terror, supported by the Great Britain and the United States!