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 the Gagauz and Russians formed shortly thereafter, in opposition to Moldovan demands and enjoying support from the then 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. Grand National Assembly Grand National Assembly () was the first major achievement of the Popular Front. Mass demonstrations organized by its activists, including one (the "Grand National Assembly") attended by 300,000 participants on 27 August, were of critical importance in convincing the Moldovan Supreme Soviet to adopt a new language law