of plunging the nation into civil war. Having outlived his usefulness, Goga was sacked as Prime Minister and Carol appointed Patriarch Elie Cristea, the head of the Romanian Eastern Orthodox Church, as his successor. Carol knew he would command wide respect in a country where the majority of the population was Orthodox. On 11 February 1938, Carol drafted a new constitution. Although it was superficially similar to its 1923 predecessor, it was actually a severely authoritarian and corporatist document. The new constitution effectively codified the emergency powers Carol had seized in February, turning his government into a de facto legal dictatorship. It concentrated virtually all governing power in his hands, almost to the point of absolute monarchy. The new constitution was approved in a plebiscite held under far-from-secret conditions; voters were required to appear before an election bureau and verbally state whether they approved the constitution; silence was deemed as a "yes" vote. Under these conditions, an implausible 99.87 percent were reported as having approved the new charter, against fewer than 5,500 votes against it. At the time of his coup in February 1938, Carol informed the German minister Wilhelm Fabricius of his wish for closer ties between his country and Germany. Thierry told Carol in a meeting after the coup that his new government was "well received" in Paris, and the French would not allow the end of democracy to affect their relations with Romania. The new government of Patriarch Cristea did not introduce new anti-Semitic laws, but did not repeal the laws passed by Goga either, though Cristea was less extreme about enforcing these laws. When asked by a Jewish friend if his citizenship would be restored now that Goga was gone, the Interior Minister Armand Călinescu-who detested the Iron Guard and antisemitism-replied that the Cristea government had no interest in restoring citizenship back to the Jews. In March 1938, Armand Călinescu, the Interior Minister who had emerged as one of Carol's closet allies and who was to serve as the "strong man" of the new regime demanded the Iron Guard be finally destroyed. In April 1938, Carol moved to crush the Iron Guard by having Codreanu imprisoned for libeling the historian Nicolae Iorga after Codreanu had published a public letter accusing Iorga of dishonest business dealings. After Codreanu's conviction on 19 April 1938, he was convicted again in a second trial on 27 May 1938 of high