Ion Diaconescu after seventeen years in prison as party of an amnesty program for political prisoners. Romanian dictator, President Nicolae Ceaușescu, and the Communist government fell in the Romanian Revolution of 1989. Diaconescu co-founded the Christian-Democratic National Peasants' Party in 1989 after the revolution. Diaconescu served as the Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies of Romania, the lower house of the Romanian Parliament, from 1996 to 2000. In 2011, Diaconescu criticized his own Christian-Democratic National Peasants' Party, which has been plagued by in-fighting, saying that the party should be relaunched under the leadership of former Prime Minister, Victor Ciorbea. Diaconescu died in
Alexandru Drăghici As historian Marius Oprea notes, this initiative of his was the culmination of periodic antisemitic purges inside and outside the party structures. When Gheorghiu-Dej died in March 1965, Ion Gheorghe Maurer, Chivu Stoica, and Emil Bodnăraș, fearful of seeing Drăghici come to power, all backed Ceaușescu as the new leader. Maurer also considered that Ceaușescu had stood up to Khrushchev, while Drăghici was seen as a loyal follower of the Soviet Union. Bacon writes: "So powerful was the apparatus of terror that its chief, Alexandru Dr[ă]ghici, challenged Ceau[ș]escu for political power following Gheorghiu-Dej's death. It is a tribute to Ceau[ș]escu's