image with the post-1989 public, and to the phenomenon as "fantasies of persecution." The wartime dictator's image appealed to many politicians of the post-1989 period, and sporadic calls for his rehabilitation were issued at the highest levels of authority. Far right groups issued calls for his canonization by the Romanian Orthodox Church (together with a similar request to canonize Corneliu Zelea Codreanu). Certain neofascist groups claim to represent a legacy of Codrenism from which Sima was a deviationist, and these have also become Antonescu apologists. A particular case in this process was that of forces gathered around the Greater Romania Party, a group often characterized as merging xenophobic or neofascist messages and the legacy of Ceaușescu's national communism. Founded by party leader and former Săptămîna contributor Corneliu Vadim Tudor, România Mare magazine is known to have equated Antonescu and Ceaușescu, presenting them both as "apostles of the Romanian people". In his bid for the office of President during the 1996 election, Vadim Tudor vowed to be a new Antonescu. Boia remarks that this meeting of extremes offers an "extraordinary paradox". Drăgan also openly resumed his activities in Romania, often in collaboration with Vadim Tudor's group, founding three organizations tasked with campaigning for Antonescu's rehabilitation: the media outlet Europa Nova, the Ion Antonescu Foundation and the Ion Antonescu League. His colleague Radu Theodoru endorsed such projects while accusing Jews of being "a long-term noxious factor" and claiming that it was actually ethnic Romanians who were victims of a communist Holocaust. Ion Coja and Paul Goma notably produced radical claims relying on fabricated evidence and deflecting blame for the crimes onto the Jews themselves. Several journals edited by Ion Cristoiu repeatedly argued in favor of Antonescu's rehabilitation, also making xenophobic claims; similar views were sporadically present in national dailies of various hues, such as Ziua, România Liberă and Adevărul. Various researchers argue that the overall tendency to exculpate Antonescu was endorsed by the ruling National Salvation Front (FSN) and its successor group, later known as Social Democratic Party, who complemented an emerging pro-authoritarian lobby while depicting their common opponent King Michael and his supporters as traitors. Similar attempts to deny the role of Antonescu in the Holocaust were also made by the main opposition parties, the Christian Democratic National Peasants' Party and the National Liberal Party, with Radu Câmpeanu, the latter party's president, publicly describing the wartime leader as a "great Romanian"