Has a coup ever been overthrown peacefully? Or mostly peacefully

by Soft-Ebb696
warneagle

Sure, there are plenty of examples of this, such as the end of most of the Eastern Bloc Communist regimes (the only real exception being Romania, which violently overthrew and executed its leaders). Another notable example is the coup that overthrew Ion Antonescu's regime in Romania shortly before the Red Army overran Romania in August 1944. I'm writing a book on that period and have been working on my chapter on that period in the last couple of weeks, so I'll use that as an example.

By the summer of 1944, the Romanian forces on the southern part of the Eastern Front were on the verge of collapse. They never really recovered from the destruction of the 3rd and 4th Armies at Stalingrad, which cost them far more men and materiel than they could ever replace, especially since the Germans had reneged on their obligations under their prewar economic agreements with Romania. The remnants of the Romanian Army had barely survived an initial Soviet thrust into Romania in the spring of 1944. By that time, Antonescu's government had long been working the back channels and trying to conclude a separate peace with the Western Allies, hoping to prevent a Soviet invasion and occupation of Romania. Those advances, which began in early 1943, shortly after the Battle of Stalingrad concluded, were unsurprisingly rejected since the Romanian offer fell short of an unconditional surrender; the Allies refused to accept an armistice without Soviet approval, and the Soviets had no incentive to negotiate as they were rapidly advancing on the section of the front where the Romanian forces were engaged.

The figurehead king of Romania, King Mihai, along with the leaders of the major prewar political parties (the National Liberal Party and the National Peasants' Party) started negotiations with the Allies in the spring of 1944 to conclude an armistice if they were able to depose Antonescu. Antonescu's government had become quite unpopular with the Romanian public due to the course of the war turning against Romania (including the bombing of Romanian cities by the USAAF and RAF), but there wasn't significant popular resistance at that point, or at least there was no threat of imminent revolution. In June 1944, two of the leaders of the Soviet-backed Romanian Communist Party, Lucretiu Patrascanu and Emil Bodnaras, met with King Mihai to convince him to join a combined effort with the Communists and their fellow travelers, plus the National Liberals and National Peasants' leaders, to conclude an armistice with the Allies and depose Antonescu. The King agreed to this plan, and the coup planners continued to negotiate with the Allies while waiting for an opportunity to execute the coup.

That opportunity came a couple of months later when the Soviets launched a second invasion of Romania on 20 August 1944. They rapidly shattered the weakened Romanian defenses and broke through into Romania. On 23 August 1944, Mihai called Antonescu to his palace (along with some of his ministers) and ordered him to sign an armistice with the Allies. When Antonescu refused, he and his ministers were arrested, effectively deposing him. Romania concluded an armistice with the allies on 12 September and spent the rest of the war fighting on the Allied side. Antonescu was taken into captivity and held in the Soviet Union until his trial in Romania in May 1946, where he was convicted of war crimes and executed along with three other members of his government on 1 June 1946.

It's worth noting that this coup was essentially an elite coup, rather than one that was the result of massive popular unrest, like the coup that overthrew Nicolae Ceausescu and resulted in his execution in December 1989. That probably explains why the coup was a bloodless one, since popular unrest (usually) results in violence, even if it stops short of the execution of its leaders. The Revolutions of 1989 were (mostly) peaceful outside of Romania, but most of the other Eastern Bloc countries had experienced some form of political violence in their relatively recent history leading up to the revolutions (e.g. martial law in Poland in the early 80s). I'm not really proposing a general theory of bloodless coups here, but it's an interesting distinction nonetheless.

There are probably a litany of other examples, but I'm gonna stay in my lane here so to speak.

Sources:

Adrian Cioroianu, Pe umerii lui Marx. O introducere în istoria comunismului românesc (Curtea Veche, 2005)

Dennis Deletant, Hitler's Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu and His Regime (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)

......, Romania under Communism: Paradox and Degeneration (Routledge, 2019)

Vladimir Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism (U of California Press, 2003)