Protests against the April 2009 Moldovan parliamentary election results began on 6 April 2009 in major cities of Moldova (including Bălți and the capital, Chișinău) before the final official results were announced. The demonstrators claimed that the election, which saw the governing Party of Communists of the Republic of Moldova (PCRM) win a majority of seats, were fraudulent, and alternatively demanded a recount, a new election, or resignation of the government. Similar demonstrations took place in other major Moldovan cities, including the country's second largest, Bălți, where over 1,000 people protested.
The protests and wave of violence is sometimes described as the "grape revolution" but the term was not used much by outsiders; in Moldova, it is sometimes referred as the Chisinău Uprising (Romanian: Revolta de la Chișinău). Some of the protesters discussed and organized themselves using Twitter, hence its moniker used by the media, the Twitter Revolution. In Chișinău, where the number of protesters rose above 30,000, the demonstration escalated into a riot on 7 April. Rioters attacked the parliament building and presidential office, breaking windows, setting furniture on fire and stealing property.
The unrest began as a public protest after the announcement of preliminary election results on 6 April 2009, which showed the Party of Communists of the Republic of Moldova victorious, winning approximately 50% of the votes. Final results, published on 8 April, showed that the PCRM garnered 49.48% of the vote, gaining 60 parliament seats – one less than the three-fifths required for the party to control the presidential election. The opposition rejected the election results, accusing the authorities of falsification in the course of counting the votes and demanded new elections.
The PCRM had been in power since 2001. A series of protests had been organized by opposition parties in 2003, when the government attempted to replace the school subject "History of the Romanians" with "History of Moldova". Students protested for months before the government backed down on its plans.
Petru Negură, a university professor of sociology at the Moldova State University and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, France, attributed the origins of the crisis to the ethnic identity problem: some people in Moldova identify themselves as "Moldovans", while others as "Romanians".
The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) International Election Observing Mission declared the elections generally free and fair, although it also reported that the comparison of data on the voting age population provided by the Moldovan Ministry of the Interior with the number of registered voters provided by local executive authorities revealed a discrepancy of some 160,000. A member of the OSCE observation team, Emma Nicholson disagreed with the assessment of the OSCE report on the fairness of the elections.
A number of voters have also reported cases of fraud where deceased and nonattendant persons were registered as having voted.
According to Vladimir Socor, a political analyst for the Jamestown Foundation, the elections were evaluated as positive on the whole, with some reservations not affecting the outcome or the overall initial assessment. Exit polls had shown a comfortable win for the Communist Party, with the only uncertainty being the size of the winning margin.
Opposition parties pointed out that the lists of eligible voters included 300,000 more people compared to the previous elections, although the population of Moldova has been shrinking. Due to this, they claimed that around 400,000 fictive voters had been created in the previous two months and that this changed the voting result. It was also claimed that the authorities had printed more than one voting bulletin for certain persons.
The first demonstrations, organized as a flashmob by a 25-year-old Moldovan journalist Natalia Morar, began in Chișinău on 6 April 2009, with a larger number of demonstrators arriving on the next day, 7 April. The demonstration, numbering over ten thousand, most of them students and young people, gathered in the city center on Ștefan cel Mare boulevard. The protest against the announced election results turned into clashes with the police, who used tear gas and water cannons. However, the police were soon overwhelmed by the number of the protesters. Rioters broke into the nearby parliament building and the office of president. Entering the building through broken windows, demonstrators set parts of the building on fire, using documents and furniture both inside and outside. The building was retaken by the police later in the evening.
The protesters, some of which carried Romanian flags, chanted pro-Western, pro-Romanian and anti-government slogans such as "We want Europe", "We are Romanians" and "Down with Communism".
Two teenagers, Ion Galațchi and Dragoș Mustețea, with the alleged approval of the policemen, replaced the Flags of Moldova at the Presidential and Parliament buildings with a Flag of Romania and a Flag of Europe, claiming that they expected that this would calm the crowd.
The emergency hospital of Chișinău reported treating over 78 injured police officers and protesters on 8 April, while the Moldovan president stated that 270 people were injured in the riots. Moldovan opposition called on the authorities to carry out new elections and on the demonstrators to cease violence. Moldovan national television had initially reported that a young woman died of carbon monoxide poisoning due to the fires within the parliament building set off by the rioters. However, it was later reported that the woman was saved by a team of medics.
On the evening of 7 April, a group of protesters organised a National Salvation Committee, consisting of student and civic representatives. Writer Nicolae Dabija, a vice-president of the committee said that the intended purpose of the committee is to organise new elections.
On 7 April, Serafim Urechean, leader of the opposition Party Alliance Our Moldova, during a meeting with President Voronin said that the riots were orchestrated by security services. However, former Moldovan President Petru Lucinski believes the violence was the spontaneous result of the actions of leaderless youths frustrated with the waning of Moldovan democracy. He said that there is no need to look further to explain the unrest and the movement "didn't have any leaders, one part went in one direction, a peaceful one and another part took a violent turn."
Protests of solidarity with demonstrators in Chișinău took place in Cimișlia, Bălți, Ungheni and other Moldovan cities.
The protests continued on Sunday, 12 April, when around 3,000 protesters gathered in the central square where the mayor of Chișinău, Dorin Chirtoacă, held a speech about how Moldova's youth reject Communism because they "understand that their future has been stolen". However, the students were notably absent from the crowd, having been sanctioned for their participation in the previous protests.
Arrests and accusations of torture