Smallholders' Party's second-in-command after Zoltán Tildy. In the November 1945 parliamentary elections, the Independent Smallholders' Party won a large majority of the popular vote and parliamentary seats, but pressure from the Soviet-dominated Allied Commission forced them into a coalition arrangement with the Communists and Social Democrats. Nagy was named speaker of the new parliament while Tildy became the new Prime Minister, and both became members of the High National Council which served as Hungary's provisional collective head of state. After Hungary's transformation into a republic in February 1946 and Tildy's subsequent elevation to President of Hungary, Nagy became the new premier. Premiership As prime minister, he resisted attempts by the Hungarian Communist Party to gain complete control of the government, favoring a parliamentary democracy over both the prewar aristocratic order and the Communists' intended dictatorship of the proletariat. Inheriting a war-ravaged country, his government oversaw the beginnings of reconstruction, including solving a world-record rate of hyperinflation by replacing the Hungarian pengő with the forint in August 1946. This was done with the help of the United States, when in June 1946 President Harry Truman had agreed with Prime Minister Nagy to return gold reserves captured by the US at the end of the war, without which stabilization would have been impossible. His government also signed the Paris Peace Treaties of 1947, formally ending Hungary's involvement in World War II and renouncing all territorial gains in that war, as well as agreeing to pay reparations to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. His government also signed a population exchange agreement with Czechoslovakia, allowing the latter to expel as many ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia as Slovaks in Hungary applied for resettlement in Czechoslovakia. Less than 80,000 Hungarian Slovaks ultimately did so, foiling the plans of Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš to deport his country's ethnic Hungarian minority as was done to its ethnic Germans. At the same time, the Communist Party and their fellow-travelers soon began to deploy "salami tactics" against the Smallholders' Party, hoping to deprive it of its parliamentary majority, and began demanding the ouster of its most outspoken anti-Communist elements. This began in March 1946 with the formation of a "Left Bloc" including the Communists, Social Democrats, and National Peasant Party, opposed to the majority Smallholders on almost every issue and intending to create political deadlock to force its own agenda. Its first demand was the expulsion of 20 "reactionaries"