An independent republic since 1991, Moldova is today known in the Western media as the “poorest country in Europe.” In the years since the dismantling of the Soviet bloc, poverty became widespread alongside mass migration of the Moldovan labor force. One-fourth of a population that numbers less than four million now works abroad, in both Russia and Western Europe, and as much as 25 percent of the country’s GDP comes from personal remittances.

Yet there are signs of resistance in the country. Since last autumn, Moldova’s capital city of Chișinău has been swept by a wave of popular protest, which crested in January, when demonstrators broke into the parliament building and temporarily occupied it.

The crowd of several thousand protesters were attempting to prevent the appointment of the new government lead by the Democratic Party’s Pavel Filip. The legislative body was in a rush: at 2 PM the Permanent Bureau of the Parliament (the body responsible for setting the date and structure of elections, among other things) announced that an extraordinary session would begin two hours later, during which the new government — backed by the United States, the European Union, and Romania — would be appointed.