Socialist Peasants' Party

Socialist Peasants' Party Partidul Socialist Țărănesc
Leader	Mihai Ralea
Founded	1938 1943 (reestablishment)
Dissolved	1944
Split from	National Peasants' Party
Merged into	Ploughmen's Front
Headquarters	Bucharest, Romania
Newspaper	Dezrobirea
Ideology	Socialism (Marxism) Agrarianism Corporatism Antifascism
Political position	Far-left
National affiliation	National-Democratic Coalition Patriotic Antihitlerite Front National Democratic Front

The Socialist Peasants' Party (Romanian: Partidul Socialist Țărănesc, or Partidul Socialist Țărănist, PSȚ) was a short-lived political party in Romania, presided over by the academic Mihai Ralea. Created nominally in 1938 but dissolved soon after, it reemerged during World War II. A clandestine group, it opposed the fascist regime of Ion Antonescu, although its own roots were planted in authoritarian politics. Looking to the Soviet Union for inspiration, the PSȚ was cultivated by the Romanian Communist Party (PCdR), and comprised a faction of radicalized social democrats, under Lothar Rădăceanu.

Perceived as a communist tool, the PSȚ was prevented by other parties from participating in the August 23 Coup against Antonescu. It entered its legal phase in the late months of 1944, but was soon absorbed into the more powerful Ploughmen's Front.

Ralea entered politics as one of the National Peasants' Party (PNȚ) intellectuals in Iași, before his 1938 move to Bucharest. In this context, he was a prominent figure in the centrist faction of the party, with Armand Călinescu as his ally. A political and social theorist, he endorsed the PNȚ's agrarian-and-corporatist notion of a "peasant state", against the social-democratic wing of the party. As scholar Angela Harre notes, Ralea and other PNȚ leaders "tried to use the vague picture of a peasant state to counterbalance the growing fascist impact on society with an alternative democratic state model." During that time, Ralea had established contacts with the outlawed Communist Party, and already supported its antifascist agenda. PCdR contacts viewed him as one of the "bourgeois personalities with antifascist views."

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