In 1938, after Carol II banned political parties and established a royal dictatorship, he chose Cristea to be Prime Minister of Romania, a position in which he served for about a year (between 11 February 1938 and his death on 6 March 1939).

[2][3] Cristea then studied philosophy and modern philology at the University of Budapest (1891–1895), where he was awarded a doctorate in 1895 – with a dissertation about the life and works of Mihai Eminescu (given in Hungarian).

On 1 December, he was (with Vasile Goldiș, Iuliu Hossu, and Alexandru Vaida-Voevod) a member of Austro-Hungarian Romanian delegation that called for the unification of Romania and Transylvania.

[10][11] Cristea's involvement in politics was, however, controversial, being criticised by journalists at Epoca newspaper, who accused him of trying to play the role of Rasputin and being a member of the palace camarilla.

In retaliation, Cristea requested that the iconographer Belizarie paint Ionescu's face on a figure of the devil in the Patriarchal Cathedral in Bucharest's Apocalypse-themed mural.

[13] In 1929, because of a serious illness (identified as leucocythemia by his medics), Cristea retired for several months to a country house in Dragoslavele, Muscel County, but despite the bleak predictions about his health state, he was soon able to return to Bucharest.

On 7 July, Miron Cristea and Constantin Sărățeanu resigned from the regency and the following day, the Parliament revoked the 1926 law which gave the throne to Mihai, Carol becoming King again.

[16] In a bid for political unity against the Iron Guard, which was gaining popularity, on 10 February 1938, Carol dismissed the government of Prime Minister Octavian Goga and seized emergency powers.

He headed a government that included seven former prime ministers and members of all major parties except for Codreanu's Iron Guard and Goga's Lăncieri, which had violently clashed.

[19] In his inaugural speech, Cristea denounced liberal pluralism, arguing that "the monster with 29 electoral heads was destroyed" (referring to the 29 political parties which were to be banned) and claiming that the king shall bring salvation.

[16] At Carol's direction, Cristea's government declared state of siege, which allowed among other things, searches without warrant and the military appropriation of privately held guns.

However, Cristea promised prosperity through some constitutional and social reforms, which were to include the "organized emigration of Jewish surplus population", that is, expulsion of all Jews who came to Romania during or after World War I.

[18] On 20 February, a new constitution was announced, which organized Romania as a "corporatist state" similar to the one of Fascist Italy, with a parliament made up of representatives of the guilds of farmers, workers and intellectuals.

[26] In March 1938, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the leader of the Iron Guard, attacked in a letter the politicians who supported Carol II, including Prime Minister Cristea and members of his government.

[28] His health deteriorated in January 1939, suffering from two heart attacks,[29] which prompted his doctors to recommend him to stay in a warmer place for a few months, in order to avoid the harsher Romanian winter.

[8] Cristea's political positions were nationalistic, seeing for Romania external threats from both the east, in the form of communism and the Soviet Union and from the capitalist and modernist west.

[34][35] Cristea strongly opposed the idea of a Concordat with the Vatican and the Romanian Orthodox Church issued a statement against it saying that "the treaty subordinates the interests of the country and the sovereignty of the state to a foreign power".

Cristea denied such claims and responded in a long document in which he said Temple was misled by the "perverse propaganda" and the "false mystification" of the Magyars, as well as the "ferocious and barbaric proselytism of the Pope".

[33] In 1937, Cristea realized that the Iron Guard was decreasing the loyalty of both the Orthodox Christians and the lower-ranked clergy to the church hierarchy and began to oppose the Guard, while adopting their antisemitic and xenophobic rhetoric:[33] he supported the revocation of the Romanian citizenship for Jewish people and their deportation, the Jews being in his opinion the major obstacle in "assuring preponderant rights to ethnic Romanians".

In response, Radu Ioanid, international archives director at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, called for the coin be withdrawn.