Founding
Leonida Lari was one of the founders and main leaders of Popular Front of Moldova.
The Front's founding congress took place on May 20, 1989 amidst the backdrop of a ferment that had gripped the republic since late 1988, spurred by the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev. Initially, it was a reformist movement modeled on the Baltic pattern that stressed glasnost, perestroika and demokratizatsiya and was not exclusivist. The congress was attended by representatives from many of Moldova's ethnic groups, including a delegate from the Gagauz umbrella organisation, Gagauz Halkı ("The Gagauz People").
During the second congress (30 June - 1 July 1989), Ion Hadârcă was elected as president of the Front, from among 3 candidates for the job. Other two candidates that sought election to the post were Nicolae Costin and Gheorghe Ghimpu.
FPM was at first called a "public organization", since political parties other than the Communist Party were forbidden in the USSR. The movement initially consisted of a broad multi-ethnic coalition of independent cultural and political groups that pressed for reform within the Soviet system and for the national emancipation of ethnic Moldovans.
However, an ethnic cleavage quickly became apparent as titular Popular Front representatives called only for the Moldovan language, written in Latin script, to be made official, and other ethnicities began to feel alienated. Already in April 1989, in response to this agitation, Gagauz nationalists had begun to demand the creation of their own ethno-federal unit in Moldova, and Gagauz mobilization accelerated in the wake of massive Moldovan nationalist demonstrations that summer calling for a new language law, republican sovereignty and secession. Also in summer 1989, Russian-speaking elites in Transnistria had defected from the movement, perceiving the language demands as an example of chauvinism. In early August, a Communist party newspaper in Tiraspol published drafts of the new law, showing that no plans existed to declare Russian a second official language; this led to a wave of strikes in Transnistria initiated by local party cadres and factory bosses. An alliance between Gagauz and Russians formed, in opposition to Moldovan demands and enjoying support from the USSR government, so that by early August, Moldova's ad hoc multiethnic opposition, which had allowed the Popular Front to emerge as a unified force from a plethora of informal organisations 2½ months earlier, was completely defunct. Moreover, Moscow was worried by the Front's raising another issue: the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; it insisted Soviet authorities would have to recognise that Moldova was taken from Romania in 1940 on the basis of a secret deal between Stalin and Hitler, a fact long denied by Soviet officials. Nevertheless, the Popular Front was far from dead and soon achieved its first major objective.
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