Mongolia’s scattered elections

Loading player

There are elections on Friday to renew the parliament in Mongolia, a large country in Central Asia that borders China to the south and Russia to the north. The polls will close at 10pm local time (i.e. 4pm Italian time) and the results should be announced within a few hours.

It is the first time Mongolian citizens have voted since last year’s approval of a constitutional reform that added 50 seats to the country’s unicameral parliament, the Great Hural. The new parliament will have 126 representatives, 78 of whom will be elected by a majoritarian system and 48 by proportional representation. Electoral colleges have also been reformed: since 1992, the year the current Mongolian constitution was approved, the average size of colleges has increased from 27,000 to 44,000 voters per college, and the reform was designed to strengthen representation by reducing the number of voters for each parliamentarian. Last year’s constitutional reform also included a rule that this year, for the first time, required parties to choose at least 30 percent of female candidates.

Mongolia is a very large and sparsely populated country: its surface area is four times that of Germany, but it has only 3.5 million inhabitants. Nearly half live in the capital Ulan Bator, in the north of the country, while about a quarter are nomadic herders, who move two, three or four times a year with their families and their herds. The country’s economy depends mainly on exports related to the extraction of coal, minerals and other resources.

23 parties united in two coalitions presented themselves in these elections. The favorite is the Mongolian People’s Party (PPM), which until 1990 was called the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party and which since 1924 had governed the country in an authoritarian manner as a communist regime influenced by the Soviet Union. After Mongolia became a democratic country, the PPM spent a period in opposition, but returned to government with several electoral victories, including the latest in 2020. It is currently the party that holds the most seats in parliament and which includes the current president, Ukhnaagiin Khürelsükh, and the prime minister Luvsannamsrain Oyun-Erdene.

The PPM still enjoys good support among the population, but recent scandals related to the exploitation of mineral resources and corruption have contributed to increasing frustration among voters towards the government. Among the PPM candidates in these elections, former Prime Minister Sükhbaataryn Batbold, who governed the country between 2009 and 2012, was excluded because he is currently under investigation in the United States for corruption. The second largest party is the Mongolian Democratic Party (PDM), which governed between 2009 and 2017.

In Mongolia the new generations represent a numerically significant part of the electorate, but abstentionism among them is historically strong. This year, also following the extensive anti-corruption protests which mainly involved young students in 2022, the more traditional parties such as the PPM and the PDM have tried to present less elderly candidates in the hope of attracting young people to vote and giving the idea of a renewal of the political class. According to analysts, however, greater participation of young people could lead a third party, the relatively more recent Khun (which means person in the Mongolian language), to win more seats: it has focused heavily on the promise of eliminating corruption in the country and is quite popular among young people. Among the central issues in the country’s debate during these elections, in addition to corruption, there are also inflation and unemployment.