The party was founded by , an engineer, in January 1990 as a political organisation opposed to the
National Salvation Front (FSN). Adrian Manolache launched the program and the platform of the PER on 5 January 1990 in the newspaper
Libertatea, being one of the newly founded parties in Romania and the second post-1989 registered one after the
Christian Democratic National Peasants' Party (PNȚ-CD). This party opposed the politics of the FSN from a very early stage and entered in an alliance with
Radu Câmpeanu's
National Liberal Party (PNL) in April, 1990, also endorsing the Timișoara Proclamation () which demanded that the former structures and members of the Romanian Communist Party should not get involved again in post-revolutionary politics. The PER participated in the
Romanian legislative election held in May 1990, winning one senator seat as well as eight deputy seats. The first (and also founding) president of the party was Adrian Manolache, but the first party congress which was held in April 1990 elected Otto Weber as president until 2001, when he was followed by Cornel Protopopescu until 2007, the latter being subsequently replaced by Dănuț Pop. In the summer of 2023, the Ecologists announced a restart for the political formation, with a new leadership and announced that they are recalibrating their public agenda in accordance with the themes of the day, from food safety to protecting the environment, in an increasingly complicated context for agriculture and environment in general. == Notable members ==