The party was established towards the end of 1944 as a successor to the
Civic Freedom Party. Part of a group of members who had belonged to now-defunct conservative parties before the war,
Géza Teleki was elected as the party's first leader. The PDP won 21 seats in the
National Interim Assembly elections in November 1944. However, Communist opposition to Teleki led to him losing his place in the Cabinet, and he resigned as party leader in June 1945. Although the PDP was ostracised by left-wing parties in the buildup to the
November 1945 elections, it still had around 60,000 members, whilst its
Világ newspaper had a circulation of around 80,000. In the elections the party won two seats, taken by
Sándor Szent-Iványi and women's rights campaigner
Margit Slachta. However, Slachta left the party in January 1946 to sit as an independent. In the
1947 elections the party won three seats. Prior to the
1949 elections several parties were forcibly merged into the Communist-led
Hungarian Independence People's Front, whilst the PDP was banned. ==References==