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
Nicolae Ceaușescu National Bolshevism such as Jean-François Thiriart, but there was a publicised connection between him and Iosif Constantin Drăgan, an Iron Guardist Romanian-Italian émigré millionaire (Drăgan was already committed to a Dacian Protochronism that largely echoed the official cultural policy). Nicolae Ceaușescu had a major influence on modern-day Romanian populist rhetoric. In his final years, he had begun to rehabilitate the image of pro-Nazi dictator Ion Antonescu. Although Antonescu's image was never a fully official myth in Ceaușescu's time, today's politicians such as Corneliu Vadim Tudor have coupled the images of the two leaders into their versions of a national Pantheon.