On June 28, 2024, parliamentary elections were held in Mongolia. Working as an international observer in 2024 brought back memories of my first visit to Mongolia in 2006 with the United Nations to participate in the celebrations of the “800th Anniversary of the Founding of Mongolia”. I visited Mongolia again for the 2016 parliamentary elections and the 2017 presidential elections. In past elections, the Mongolian Election Commission was secretive and party leaders were hesitant to speak to international observers. This year, however, every step of the election was subject to surveillance. All locations where voting, counting, and tallying took place were under surveillance camera surveillance by police. Police also filmed key stages of the electoral process, such as the opening of ballot boxes. Although technically a violation of best practices, there was a ubiquitous police presence at polling stations, we saw no evidence that voters found this intimidating. As we will see below, no party refused to speak freely with us.
Modern Mongolia prides itself on its geopolitical independence, respect for democracy, and the rule of law, but its reliance on Chinese and Russian markets has undermined its strategic autonomy. Moreover, on measures of public freedom and political transparency in international relations, Mongolia ranks last. At the same time, it is a strategic partner of the West, receiving support from both the United States and the EU. Its current political woes make this great power a much better potential ally than the other way around.
Mongolia, which gained independence from the Qing Dynasty in 1911, was a short-lived theocracy before the 1921 Mongolian Revolution doomed it to the Soviet sphere of influence. Brutal Soviet purges and Stalinist collectivization in the 1920s led to the establishment of a repressive internal dictatorship under Korlugin Choibalsan, whose hand-picked successor, Yumjagin Tsedenbal, ruled until 1984. Though Mongolia was officially outside the Kremlin during this time, Soviet rule remains evident in military repression and colonial Soviet architecture, such as crumbling military barracks that dot the country. These themes are depicted in classic Mongolian films. An unforgettable autumn (1977), Wulin Tumur (2004), Wolfpack Killing time (1939), and Words from the Heart (2003) its contemporary politics, avoiding the film’s essential mixture of assertive independence and nostalgia for socialism.
Mongolia adopted a new democratic constitution in 1992. In the country’s first legislative elections in 1992, the former communist Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party won. Further political reforms and economic “shock therapy” paved the way for neoliberalism in the early 1990s, with the backing of the IMF. Modern-day Mongolia is a semi-presidential republic with a directly elected prime minister and president. It has a mixed majority-proportional electoral system, and has also made important reforms to protect women’s rights and parliamentary representation. So how can this recent election paint a picture of Mongolia’s future in 2024? In short, this vast country (much larger than the combined land area of Europe) still has a long way to go before it meets the democratic credentials it claims to have.
Just before the vote, I spoke to the press office of the current prime minister, who also serves as chairman of the Mongolian People’s Party.
We want a new democratic future for the Mongolian people and to leave behind the corrupt mistakes of the past. The new Mongolian People’s Party will put “people first” and party interests second. We want Mongolians to proudly participate in a new era of respect for ordinary citizens and true economic prosperity for all Mongolians.
Oddly, this was almost exactly what was told to me by the office of President Batulga, a member of the rival Democratic Party, a center-right party that dates back to the democratic revolution of the late 1980s.
We cannot let our people down again. These elections are an unprecedented opportunity for Mongolia to take a legitimate step into the global democratic community. We have shown that we can take such a step by promoting the rights of women, workers and children, and by protecting our ethnic minorities. These elections are our chance to work even harder to make all these aspirations a reality for modern Mongolians.
Mongolia’s third-largest party, the HUN Party, which is running in the 2024 general election, has taken a more cautious stance, reflecting its center-right leanings. A spokesman for Dorjikand said Mongolians need to be more realistic about what the economy can afford.
We have seen MPP, Democrats and many other parties promising everything from roads to welfare for herders, but none of them have even remotely addressed the important issue of how to pay for their empty election promises. In fact, they are just as unable to offer solutions to Mongolia’s needs as the dumbest of environmentalists. They also fail to understand that, ultimately, there are two big markets: China and the Russian Federation. If you told a small herder that he had to hire a disabled woman just to get a grant from the EU or the US Embassy, that business would disappear. No amount of fancy democracy grants would put a goat on a herder’s table. The truth is that we have two big markets, and those markets pay us. If you told a herder to wait until they had 100 papers to submit to Washington or Brussels, they would say they’d rather give a little more money to the mining companies and get through the winter.
A spokesman for the Mongolian Green Party was also pessimistic: “We know our time is still far away, but will the Mongolian grasslands wait?” National Alliance leader Purevdaver was also keen to highlight the party’s environmental record. The party’s youngest, the New Alliance, cited environmental and women’s issues as its top concerns. All of this suggested that a previously missing political diversity was slowly emerging.
As for the elections, I can say that vote management has improved immeasurably. While corruption is a constant in Mongolian media, the new methods of election management seem transparent. There is a stark contrast between rural people voting in traditional dress, sometimes while caring for their pets, and the Central Election Commission’s highly sophisticated computer scanning systems that enter and analyze the vote results. A tough test of the fairness of a vote is usually the level of complaints from party observers, but frankly, there were very few of them. The results were largely as expected, the entire procedure was open to local and international scrutiny, and each stage of the process seemed transparent.
Other parties running in the 2024 elections are the Republican Party, the Civic Unity and Participation Party, and the New Unity Coalition. All of these parties are in coalitions or mergers, and their names are not as descriptive as one might imagine. According to preliminary results, the Mongolian People’s Party (MPP) won 35% of the vote, winning 68 of the 126 seats. The main opposition Democratic Party won 42 seats. The anti-corruption minority party HUN won eight seats. The Election Commission confirmed that the nationwide voter turnout was 69.3%. As a sign of future majority capture, nearly all the smaller parties had occasional small successes.
One might be forgiven for thinking that Mongolian politics has consistently played out as a struggle between the traditionalism of the MPP, the successor to the “Era of Comrades”, and the seemingly more progressive modernist forces brought about by the Democratic Party. The HUN Party’s victory in eight seats is evidence of a future “third way”. Political similarities between the major parties remain evident, and personality politics seems to be more important than history or ideology in Mongolian public opinion polls. This writer is accustomed to seeing events in Mongolia as a consistent replay of the country’s famous movies, where themes such as people’s rights, nomadic life, the infringement of mining interests, and the clash between urbanization and traditional steppe appear repeatedly. It was clear that issues such as women, the environment and environmental issues were loudly voiced in this election, but they did not have much numerical impact on the final outcome.
With a reduced majority, the MPP must balance power effectively with its rivals. How this will play out remains to be seen. This episode in Mongolia’s strange political movie ended with the recognition of the de facto constitution of the real powers. HUN materializes as a potential third-party rival in the future, and other areas show some diversity in the performance of women, environmental groups, and other special interest groups. It also means that a future coalition government of the MPP, DP, and (possibly in the future) HUN could emerge, which would mark the end of the MPP’s post-independence dominance.
Mongolian politics remain an echo of classic films laced with theory, with the major parties emerging as heroes with happy endings. Even more worrying, the elections have done little to address the most disturbing reality: Mongolia continues to depend economically on Russia and China. As in Mongolian films, one can sense the French truism that “everything changes, but everything stays the same.”
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