Viitorul

The subsequent two years brought the unification with Transylvania and the consolidation of Greater Romania; though Viitorul saluted this victory of the nationalist cause, it also came to resent the emergence of regional and regionalist challenges to the PNL's monopoly on power.

The issue was covered with derision in the more right-wing journal, Neamul Românesc, which argued that the Hungarian government had little reason to ban a cosmopolitan paper of "anonymous Symbolists", whose editorial team included the Romanian Jewish intellectual Henric Streitman and "his coreligionists".

[29] As argued by historian Alin Marian Pîrvu, this text was directly motivated by the Second Balkan War, during which Romanian recruits had been unwittingly given a chance to compare egalitarian land relations that existed in the Tsardom of Bulgaria with the harsher realities at home.

[30] On the left, the emergent Social Democratic Party, which opposed the war and the subsequent annexation of Southern Dobruja, regarded Viitorul and the PNL as hypocritical—since the newspaper had been careful to downplay rumors of a stock market crash following the Bulgarian expedition, but had also tacitly endorsed the takeover of Dobrujan land.

The legislature opened with a speech by Banu, selected by Brătianu because Viitorul had been skeptical toward Stere's more revolutionary agenda; shortly after, in an interview for the same newspaper, Finance Minister Emil Costinescu reassured voters that the PNL stood united around a moderate program.

[47] Its own editorial line mirrored Brătianu's tactics: criticized by the French journalist René Moulin as transactional and petty, it supported a delayed intervention, waiting out for the Entente to be at a clear advantage.

[54] In December, Viitorul publicized a speech by PNL activist Mihail Orleanu, which indicated that all the party wanted Romania to join the Entente, as a way of "fulfilling its national ideal" regarding Transylvania, but also that only Brătianu could decide on the "opportune moment.

[72] Brătianu's triumphant return to power at the head of another PNL cabinet also brought a settling of scores with the Ententists who had escaped to Paris, including Take Ionescu, as well as with the People's Party (PP), formed in Iași by General Alexandru Averescu.

[82] Its other content at that stage included essays about the role of theaters in promoting "national education", as well as samples from the declassified letters of Ottokar Czernin, who had represented the Austro-Hungarian government in Romania, and the full text of Brătianu's 1916 treaty with the Entente.

[90] In late March, as the Soviet Hungarian government declared a state of war with Romania, Viitorul unwittingly evidenced the PNL's indifference, only publishing news of this after they had appeared in a local newspaper (and not from an official source).

In October 1920, Viitorul carried a "long article on Hungarian duplicity", exploring the chasm that existed between, on on hand, Pál Teleki's assurances of friendship toward Romania, and, on the other, its cultivation of anti-Romanian groups such as Ébredő Magyarok.

[96] In an attempt to harm the PP's growing popularity, it published wartime documents purporting to show contacts between Averescu and the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee, a communist entity headed by Christian Rakovsky.

[97] According to Marxist historian V. Liveanu, the 1919 election, carried by universal male suffrage, saw the PNL expunging its Poporanists and "generous ones", only maintaining tiny and "bourgeois" left-wing factions, manned by figures such as Ioan Nădejde and Alexandru Vlahuță.

[103] As explained in a 1929 editorial in Viitorul, the PNL was still "decisively left-wing" when compared to the regrouped conservatives of the Vlad Țepeș League or to the Romanian fascist groups—as the main point of contention, the National Liberals rejected dictatorship and limited their critique of democracy.

[105] When the PNR finally took power with Alexandru Vaida-Voevod as prime minister, Viitorul attacked him and his government team as an "instrument for [Romania's] economic enslavement", whose activities could only convince Romanians that Transylvanians needed to be kept out of national affairs.

Viitorul, as the more respectable PNL mouthpiece, focused on current issues, while a more scandal-prone "rag", România Nouă, published unreliable revelations about Zamfirescu's alleged Germanophile past—eventually, it found itself exposed for its own connections with the Deutsche Bank.

[115] In October, after the authorities had arrested Corneliu Zelea Codreanu and other antisemitic youths for their attempt to assassinate government ministers and Adevărul editors, Viitorul raised alarm about the conspiracy's intellectual instigator—namely, the LANC's A. C.

Initially, Viitorul gave intense coverage to any sign of distrust between the PNR's Iuliu Maniu and his Peasantist allies, repeatedly claiming that the two movements were barely compatible with each another,[147] and also that Stere's emerging faction was in disagreement with both sets of leaders.

[153] During the late 1920s uncertainty, there had been new developments in the simmering Hungarian–Romanian conflict: upon the discovery of weapons being illegally trafficked through Szentgotthárd from Italy, Viitorul expressed the belief that Hungary should have been placed under direct supervision by the League of Nations.

As noted by historian Constantin I. Stan, Viitorul initially tried to present the merger as one in which the PNR had surrendered to the Peasantists; it also deplored their shared platform as prolonging the "politics of negation that has already greatly harmed the effort to organize and consolidate our newly unified Romanian state.

These events were also covered in detail by Viitorul, which recorded samples from its enemies' speeches, and mocked their political "naivete"; it also expressed worry about the "anarchic" nature of PNȚ messaging, and described the gatherings as carnival-like.

In covering a major PNȚ rally, held at Alba Iulia in May 1928, it resorted to sheer satire, claiming that the group had barely managed to reach its attendance goals, and had used various tricks to inflate the numbers.

[170] The paradox of censorship was highlighted in June by French journalist Émile Buré: "the National Peasantist government, which had been elevated by denouncing the liberal party's dictatorship, now had to resort to its own heavy-handed methods.

Political diarist Constantin Argetoianu, of the rival Agrarian Union Party, alleges that, upon inaugurating his first cabinet in January 1934, Tătărescu had accelerated embezzlement and graft, which also benefited the paper: "Viitorul had a 17-million debt in credits at the Românească Bank.

On 9 March 1935, Viitorul announced that it did not regard this platform, which was being popularized by Vaida's Romanian Front, as "chauvinistic" or unfair; instead, it observed that Romania's ethnic minorities had obtained over-representation in public affairs through "weapons that are both illegal and dishonest.

[193] Late that month, Viitorul also discussed the recent death of its longtime adversary, Stere: "This gifted man of culture and of democratic inclinations could not live up to his promise, to what could have been under more auspicious circumstances and had he not made the same mistakes.

He also noted that the Guardist ideas about joining the Axis powers were especially troubling, by exposing the country to Hungarian irredentism, and also by ruining the "good relations" that had been cultivated with the Soviets; as a result of such policies, he argued, Romania would be turned into a theater of any future war.

[232] Its pages quoted at length from Winston Churchill, and in particular his musings about the possible reemergence of totalitarianism in Eastern Europe (read by historian Victor Boghean as near-explicit warnings about the local communists and their tactics).

[244] As a special envoy of Viitorul, Adriana Georgescu observed the illegal maneuvers whereby the PCR's leaders, especially Emil Bodnăraș and Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, established a firm hold on regional prefectures ahead of the final move on Bucharest's main executive bodies.

As later revealed by scholar Șerban Rădulescu-Zoner, the newspaper was in fact sabotaged when communist agents resorted to directly intimidating workers at Independența Printing Press, destroying equipment and sequestering Viitorul's envoy, Teofil Zaharia.

Propaganda image in a PNL "village voters' calendar", published ahead of the November 1919 elections : a soldier and the plowman rallying in front of the Romanian tricolor
Unsigned editorial cartoon in Viitorul of 1 December 1928, mocking the Maniu cabinet for intending to normalize Romanian–Soviet relations : Constantin Stere on the Dniester , fraternizing with a Soviet border guard
Front page of Viitorul on 20 December 1937, ahead of the general elections (announced as the "duty of an historic hour"); with portraits of factional leaders Dinu Brătianu and Gheorghe Tătărescu
Full-page appeal to Romania's "conscious democrats" in support of "Country, King, Liberty"; penned by the PNL youth for Viitorul , 17 February 1945