Mongolian presidential campaign nothing if not negative

Mongolian presidential campaign nothing if not negative
Government Palace on Chinggis Square in Ulaanbaatar houses the State Great Khural (parliament) and the offices of the prime minister and president. / Photo: Brücke-Osteuropa
By bne IntelliNews June 23, 2017

With leaked tapes and "offshore asset" corruption claims flying around, the mudslinging has been ugly to watch in the run-up to Mongolia’s presidential contest on June 26. In what is the seventh such election since the Buddhist nation’s peaceful democratic revolution in 1990, the main contenders are Chairman of the Parliament (the State Great Khural) and election favourite Enkhbold Miyegombo, of the ruling Mongolian People’s Party (MPP), and Battulga Khaltmaa of the Democratic Party, which currently controls the presidency.

Enkhbold, an economist by training and a former mayor of the capital Ulaanbaatar, has been kept busy battling a campaign surprise – a three-year-old audio recording in circulation is said to feature him and two MPP colleagues discussing payments for senior government positions. Denying the claims, the MPP insists the tapes have been edited to portray the remarks out of context.

Self-made millionaire and judo star Battulga, meanwhile, is not without very unwelcome troubles of his own. The MPP accuses him of misappropriating mining contracts, while he faces allegations posted on the internet that he has large overseas unstated assets. His campaign has denied all the claims put forward.

Those looking for a long-odds winner in the two-round election (the opinion polls are entirely unreliable) would have to take a punt on former Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party lawmaker Ganbaatar Sainkhuu, who, like Battulga, is a populist going up against business community favourite Enkhbold. Mongolia’s economic fortunes rest on its mining of gold, copper and coal and Ganbaatar – the last-minute candidate of the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP), an offshoot of the MPP – has pledged to “take back the natural resources for each citizen’’.

The nation of 3.1mn will be electing its fifth president, with President Elbegdorj Tsakhia stepping down having served the maximum two terms. The stakes are not seen as so high because in Mongolia the parliament controls the government. Even though the president can veto legislative decisions, the parliament can overturn his interventions with a two-thirds majority vote. However, the head of state can also make some key appointments, including the heads of the Independent Authority Against Corruption and the General Intelligence Agency.

The voters will be going to the polls with the country hobbled by the huge world commodities downturn experienced in recent years. However, it now has a chance to struggle for a sustainable recovery, with a $5.5bn International Monetary Fund-led bailout package having been approved in late May. The winning candidate will expect to have a say in exactly how to deploy that rescue package to pull Mongolia out of the doldrums and break the country out of its boom-bust-bailout cycle.

Tape woes

Enkhbold’s leaked tape woes centre on a 90-minute recording which Mongolia’s Independent Authority Against Corruption has gotten a hold of. It is said to show the candidate and two other leading lights of the MPP negotiating appointments to leading public offices for cash bribes worth MNT60bn (€22.8mn). But the anti-corruption authority has come to the conclusion that the audio is “unclear”. The tape has been transferred to the Ulaanbaatar City Prosecutor’s Office for further investigation.

The MPP has itself come under fire for  its controversial new media bill, which critics argue introduces manipulative censorship. In late April, over a dozen TV stations went dark and seven newspapers blacked out their front pages to call attention to the proposed Law on Infringement. The legislation would allow police to bypass the courts and impose fines running up to approximately $40,000 for spreading defamatory information.

Nevertheless,  Enkhbold has not lost his tag as the most likely candidate to emerge as president because the Democratic Party is widely blamed for having plunged the country into its current parlous state.  Mongolia grew at more than 17% in 2011 but only notched up 1% GDP growth in 2016. The party was consequently hammered when it lost power in the 2016 parliamentary elections and some voters in this election might be disconcerted that its candidate, self-made millionaire and judo star Battulga, is aiming to reinstate a banking measure that at one point led the IMF-led bailout to grind to a halt.

The IMF froze the process of agreeing the bailout because of a controversial banking requirement in a draft law which stated that revenues from large-scale projects had to pass through a Mongolian bank account. Messing with the restarted international financial relief is a dangerous game to play, with the IMF's $5.5bn package equivalent to half of mining-dependent Mongolia’s GDP.

But Enkhbold also faces a dilemma where the bailout is concerned. In order to be accepted into the IMF’s three-year Extended Fund Facility program, the MPP had to backtrack on many general election promises. Its tax rises, meaner social safety net, frozen public-sector wages and raised retirement age all run counter to the manifesto it was elected on. 

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