On 28 June 2024 Mongolia conducted parliamentary elections. My service in 2024 as an international observer quickened my memories of my first time there in 2006 with the UN, to help celebrate “800 Years of Mongolian Statehood”. I was back again for the 2016 Parliamentary Elections and for the 2017 Presidential Poll. In past elections, there was something of a cloak of secrecy on the part of the Mongolian Electoral Commission, and party leaders were reluctant to speak to international observers. Yet, this year the entirety of the electoral apparatus was open to observation. Every polling, counting and tabulation location was in CCTV scrutiny under the supervision of police. The police also photographed key stages of the process such as the opening of ballot boxes. Technically a breach of best practice, police were omnipresent in polling stations but we saw no evidence that voters found this intimidatory. As I will note below, no party declined to speak freely to us.

Modern Mongolia prides itself on geo-political independence, respect for democracy and the rule of law, although its strategic autonomy is compromised by dependence on Chinese and Russian markets. Moreover, the country features at the bottom end of all the scales we use in international relations to measure public freedom and political transparency. At the same time, the country is an also a strategic partner of the west and is being cultivated both by the USA and the EU, all the more so because of the political travails of the present which make this large country a much better potential friend than the reverse.

Having become independent of the Qing dynasty in 1911, Mongolia was briefly a theocracy before the 1921 Mongolian Revolution sealed its fate within the Soviet Union sphere of interest. The brutal Soviet purges of the 1920s, and Stalinist collectivization, generated a repressive indigenous dictatorship under Khorloogiin Choibalsan – replaced by his hand-picked successor, Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal, who served until 1984. Throughout this period the country remained formally outside the Kremlin, but the Soviet grips are still evidenced in colonialist Soviet architecture of military repression and crumbling military barracks dotted across the country. These themes play out in classic Mongolia cinema like An Unforgettable Autumn (1977), Uuliin Tumur (2004), Wolf Pack Сүрэг чоно (1939), and Words from the Heart (2003.) Its modern politics eschew that crucial cinemographic mixture of assertive independence and socialist nostalgia.

Mongolia adopted a new........

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