Quisling began to familiarise himself with the international fascist movement, attending the 1934 Montreux Fascist conference in December. For his party, the association with Italian fascism could not have come at a worse time, so soon after headlines of illegal Italian incursions into Abyssinia. On his return trip from Montreux, he met Nazi ideologue and foreign policy theorist Alfred Rosenberg, and though he preferred to see his own policies as a synthesis of Italian fascism and German Nazism, by the time of the 1936 elections, Quisling had in part become the "Norwegian Hitler" that his opponents had long accused him of being. Part of this was due to his hardening anti-Semitic stance, associating Judaism with Marxism, liberalism and, increasingly, anything else he found objectionable, and part as a result of "Nasjonal Samling's" growing similarity to the German Nazi Party. Despite receiving an unexpected boost when the Norwegian government acceded to Soviet demands to arrest Leon Trotsky, the party's election campaign never gained momentum. Although Quisling sincerely believed he had the support of around 100,000 voters, and declared to his party that they would win an absolute minimum of ten seats, "Nasjonal Samling" managed to poll just 26,577, fewer than in 1933 when they had fielded candidates in only half the districts. Under this pressure, the party split in two, with Hjort leading the breakaway group; although fewer than fifty members left immediately, many more drifted away during 1937.