Soon after the start of the demonstrations that led Mongolia’s prime minister to resign last week, Enkhbadral Myagmar noticed masked figures following him when he left home. One day, after he received a call from an unfamiliar number, a man on the street asked to use his phone and when he was finished, Enkhbadral saw he had called the same number.
The 32-year-old sociologist was one of a small group that organised the protests, which followed reports of lavish spending by former prime minister Luvsannamsrain Oyun-Erdene’s 23-year-old son. The others had noticed suspicious behaviour too and all had been subject to aggressive trolling online.
“We kept it quiet because we didn’t want to scare young people away from joining the protests,” says Enkhbadral.
The daily demonstrations in front of the building on Ulaanbaatar’s Sukhbaatar Square that houses the State Great Hural, Mongolia’s parliament, began on May 14th with just 40 people. But by the time the prime minister announced his resignation last week, thousands were coming to the square every day.
“It was started by a group of friends who all knew one another and had collaborated on things before. I am the oldest, the others are in their 20s,” Enkhbadral said, adding that none of the group had any political party affiliations.
“It was building up over time, the frustration over how freedom of speech and media freedom, and civic space, was shrinking. It was all building up and the outburst was this protest. As soon as the news about the lavish lifestyle of the prime minister’s son came out on social media, frustration really peaked, and then they started to contact each other.”
Oyun-Erdene, who became Mongolia’s prime minister in 2021, rose to prominence as an organiser of mass demonstrations against corruption and presented himself as a politician in touch with ordinary people. But when his son’s fiancee posted pictures of an expensive Dior bag and boasted of helicopter rides and luxury cars, it was not clear how the couple could afford such a lifestyle.
The demonstrators demanded an explanation from the prime minister but for weeks he declined to address the issue. Even when, on the eve of his resignation, Oyun-Erdene and his son submitted financial statements to anti-corruption authorities, they offered no public account of where the money came from.
With 3.5 million people living on a landlocked territory between Russia and China, 22 times the size of Ireland, Mongolia is the most sparsely-populated country in the world. Rich in copper, gold, coal and other minerals, it is still a lower middle-income country where 30 per cent of the population live below the poverty line.
A communist state with close ties to the Soviet Union from 1921 until 1990, Mongolia has been a parliamentary democracy for the past 35 years. International monitors have consistently approved the country’s elections as free and fair but the political system has been dogged by corruption, much of it linked to the mining industry.
“After 70 years under a socialist system, the first accumulation of capital was only possible in mining and real estate. And this was of course misused by people close to decision-making,” said Jargalsaikhan Dambadarjaa, an economist and policy analyst who runs the DeFacto Institute in Ulaanbaatar.
“Because of this unequal distribution of wealth there are groups which support political parties above or under the table and certain interests prevail.”
Oyun-Erdene’s government, a grand coalition including his Mongolian People’s Party (MPP) and their usual opponents in the Democratic Party, commanded 94 per cent of the seats in parliament. Last April, it passed a long-anticipated law establishing a sovereign wealth fund that allows the government to take a 34 per cent stake in 16 mines judged to contain strategic mineral deposits.
“That’s why this guy paid the cost. He finally wanted to really accumulate money in this wealth fund,” Jargalsaikhan said.
“Out of the 16 mines, seven are state-owned, which means they can give money to the wealth fund. But the other nine are owned by private individuals, nine families really. They don’t want to, because this new law says that 34 per cent of the deposits of the strategic mines come to the state and will accumulate into that fund. You can imagine what big money we’re talking about.”
Jargalsaikhan believes that the new government will leave the sovereign wealth fund law on the books but that it will not implement it. So the state will simply not move to take its 34 per cent stake in the privately-owned mines.
Enkhbadral agrees that the private mining interests are probably happy to see the back of Oyun-Erdene but he rejects any suggestion that they orchestrated or manipulated the demonstrations. And he argues that strengthening Mongolia’s democratic culture is essential to make politicians more accountable and their links with moneyed interests more transparent.
“To maintain the legitimacy of the protest and to protect it from interference from outside interests, we formulated three demands,” he said.
“The first was that the prime minister should resign. The second was an end to the grand coalition and the return of a parliamentary opposition. The third was that there should be no constitutional amendment to allow the president to run for another term in office.”
Oyun-Erdene claimed he was the victim of an “organised campaign” by “major, visible and hidden interests” but when he failed to win a majority in a confidence vote on June 2nd, he resigned as prime minister. His MPP announced the end of the grand coalition, putting the Democratic Party back into opposition.
Mongolia’s president is directly elected and is limited to a single, six-year term. Although the office has few executive powers, the president appoints the chief justice and nominates other members of the judiciary and the chief prosecutor, chairs the national security council and can veto legislation.
There has long been speculation that Khürelsükh Ukhnaa, who took office in 2021, would attempt to seek a second term and to change the constitution to give the president more powers. But the president confirmed last week that he had no intention of seeking a further term in office, conceding the demonstrators’ third demand.
“All the protests and demonstrations before this one, they were never successful in the end, or they were used by the government. But this protest achieved its demands,” Enkhbadral said.
“Since 2008, any kind of demonstration was not a way to change anything. They were all very unsuccessful. This one not only won the three demands, but also culturally, it set a new standard. Every day we had agendas, every day, whatever the protesters were doing was transparent and announced. The organisers were young people from media backgrounds and from civil society and they brought a new approach to democracy. It showed a new era of democracy emerging in Mongolia.”
The MPP this week nominated Zandanshatar Gombojav, president Khürelsükh’s chief of staff and a former party general secretary, as prime minister. Enkhbadral is optimistic that the Democratic Party will resume its role as an opposition party in holding the government to account.
New legislation regulating political parties and requiring greater transparency on their funding should come into force after a year-long delay. And a change to the electoral system means there are now more members of parliament, a portion of whom are elected in individual constituencies rather than as part of a party list.
“Ever since the Covid pandemic, we have had what we call a PR government that tried to buy the media and control the information that the public received,” Enkhbadral said.
“And their attitude was, we’re going to make you think what we want you to think. So the outcome of the demonstration is not about one person or one government, one coalition. Its effect is to break this PR government that has been in place since the pandemic until now.”
