National Democratic Party of Poland

(NDF; Stronnictwo Narodowe Democratyczne), a Polish bourgeois nationalist party that existed from 1897 to 1945.

The NDP was the ideological successor to the Polish League, founded in 1887 and reorganized as the National League in 1893. In 1905–07, seeking to win autonomy for the Kingdom of Poland, the party supported tsarism and opposed the revolution. During World War I it adopted a pro-Entente position in the hope of uniting the Polish lands under Austrian and German rule with the Kingdom of Poland, which was to be granted autonomy within the Russian Empire. In 1919 the NDP, renamed the National Democratic Union, joined the coalition government. The party resisted the revolutionary movement, advocated an alliance with the Western powers against Soviet Russia, and demanded the Polonization of the Ukrainian, Byelorussian, and Lithuanian lands. In 1928 the party was renamed the National Party (Stronnictwo Narodowe). Fascist tendencies appeared in the party, reflected in the formation of the Camp of Great Poland (1926–33). After the latter was disbanded, the National Radical Union was founded in 1934, later breaking away from the party.

Between 1939 and 1945 the National Democrats supported the London government-in-exile and actively opposed the partisan movement and the Polish Workers’ Party. After the establishment of People’s Poland, the party ceased to exist. National Democratic groups are active among the reactionary Polish emigres.