The people who protested in the Great National Assembly Square in Chisinau on July 1 adopted a resolution by which they demanded to validate the Chisinau early local elections, to annul the mixed electoral system and to hold accountable the judges who decided to invalidate the elections. The document says that if the government does not take immediate measures to fulfil the demands during the current session of Parliament, peaceful civil disobedience actions will be taken. The first General Assembly of Citizens from the country and the diaspora was convened for August 26, 2018, IPN reports.

“Dictatorship was officially established in Moldova. For the first time in history, the Plahotniuc regime, through the agency of the judiciary it controls, nullified the results of recognized free and fair elections. The elections, as a form of expression of the sovereignty of the people, no longer work in the Republic of Moldova. As we cannot tolerate such a situation, we call on each citizen, regardless of nationality, political beliefs, ethnicity and spoken language, to take part in the permanent protests until dictatorship is eliminated and democracy is restored in the Republic of Moldova, as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution provide,” says the resolution.

The participants in the protest asked to confirm the legality of the early mayoral elections and to validate the election of Andrei Nastase as mayor general of Chisinau municipality. They also demanded to annul the mixed electoral system and to restore the proportional representation system, to dismiss the judges who took part in the adoption of unconstitutional and illegal decisions that led to the invalidation of elections and to bring them to justice.

“If the government does not initiate immediate actions to fulfil our legitimize demands during the current session of Parliament, local and regional committees of the National Resistance Movement created in the country’s localities and in the diaspora will take peaceful civil disobedience actions against dictatorship that derive from the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, such as collective and individual strikes, permanent protests in front of the Parliament and the Government Buildings, blocking of all the captured central and local institutions and of the ways of access to these,” reads the resolution.

The resolution was adopted by a unanimous vote by the participants in the protest.

The wave of protests started on June 19, after the Chisinau City Court decided to not validate the early mayoral elections and the invalidation was later upheld by the Appeals Court and the Supreme Court of Justice. Afterward, the Central Election Commission nullified the early mayoral elections held in Chisinau municipality on May 20 and June 3 (runoffs).

The police estimated the July 1 protest involved about 7,000 people, while the organizers said there were tens of thousands of people at the demonstration.