There followed several months of campaigning through small-scale "peasant congresses", attended by party eminences. Pântea organized one such meeting for Cetatea Albă County on February 4, 1919. Over the following weeks and months, this section enlisted members from various cultural backgrounds. These included Dionisie Erhan, a hierarch of the Bessarabian Orthodox Metropolis, alongside Daniel Erdmann and Andreas Widmer, both of whom were leaders of the Bessarabian Germans; other affiliates were local Ukrainians and Bulgarians. Historian Ion Gumenâi also notes that most of those who declared for the PȚB in Hotin County during early 1919 were either Slavs or Bessarabian Jews.