[8] On 19 December 2012, she was appointed as the Minister for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises, Business and Tourism Environment in the Second Ponta cabinet.

In January 2014, the PC announced Grapini's resignation from the position due to her candidacy in the 2014 European Parliament election.

[14] In addition to her committee assignments, Grapini is part of the European Parliament Intergroup on Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs).

[17] In 2012, she published a novel, Viața, între scrieri și trans-scrieri, which contained a critical presentation signed by Cornel Ungureanu [ro].

[17] Grapini has attracted media criticism due to her frequent spelling and punctuation mistakes in her Facebook account.

[19] In July 2015, a website named Grapinizer was launched, allowing users to convert grammatically correct Romanian language text into her writing style: "[it] adds redundant commas, changes the order of letters within words, and removes blanks spaces after punctuation marks.

In the message, she offended the Romanian diaspora at an anti-government rally in the Victory Square, saying they had to "pay dumb taxes for the USR".