Diamandy, who was structurally a monarchist, printed a call to order, addressing it to the Romanian proletariat. Afterward, the Laborites portrayed themselves as patriotic resisters, and Lupu even threatened to duel those who questioned his loyalty. The PM continued to have links with the revolutionary activist Ilie Cătărău, who was Lupu's emissary among the Romanian-speakers of the Russian Bessarabia Governorate. He contacted the National Moldavian Party, whose leader Pan Halippa dismissed the PM as irrelevant. In June 1917, during a renewed offensive of the Central Powers, the ailing Diamandy became one of the various Romanian public figures taking refuge in Russia. He was caught there by the October Revolution, and again took flight, died on board a refugee ship sailing the North Sea. The same month, Lupu also left Romania as a delegate of the University Professors' Association, campaigning for the Romanian cause in the United States—according to Duca, his escaping was the equivalent of a desertion, leaving typhus-stricken Romania without a highly trained physician. With Simeon G. Murafa, Cătărău founded his own "Romanian Revolutionary Party", a blend of anarchism and Romanian nationalism, before the Russian government arrested him for his propaganda in Bessarabia. Lupu was still PM president in early 1918, when a Conservative cabinet, presided upon by Alexandru Marghiloman, was called in to sign peace with the Central Powers. The PM, which coalesced around a Iași newspaper called "Tribuna", fought against that measure, and against Marghiloman's other policies, presenting its own candidates for the 1918 election. These were held with universal male suffrage, the Laborites having been instrumental in blocking legislation for demeny voting and other such forms of disenfranchisement. Marghiloman's candidates emerged as winners with a crushing majority, with the PM taking no seats in Senate and only one in Chamber—with Trancu-Iași. Although the PM's Carp announced a worldwide "rapid evolution to the left" and the transfer of social control toward "the grand army of labor", the group as a whole was viewed as moderate, or even reactionary. An editorial note by the satirist George Ranetti suggests that, in December 1918, the PM was presided upon by Protopopescu, who, as a millionaire landowner, did not have to work for a living.