Inner-Party Democracy: Rules, Money, and Pluralism

Dear viewers, warm greetings to you all today. Today's edition of our program begins right now. This time we've invited a guest to discuss the internal affairs of the Democratic Party. Let me introduce him: Mr. Chimeddorj, a former member of the Democratic Party's National Policy Committee, an economist by training. Thank you for accepting our invitation and coming to our studio.

Thank you. You're a young man who hasn't yet become widely known in society — could you briefly introduce yourself? When did you join the Democratic Party, and when did you join the National Policy Committee, the party's supreme governing body? I first started working, practically as a child, back in 2001, and then from the 2004 parliamentary election onward I began taking part in DP activities, helping with election campaigns. From 2007 I became somewhat more involved in political activity itself. There was an election in 2008, and from 2009 I worked on what was then the DP Youth Organization's leadership council, and then on all the other elections that followed. In 2017, when the DP chairman's election was held, I also ran for party chairman and registered as a candidate, but that didn't work out. In 2017 I was elected as a member of the National Policy Committee from Övörkhangai Province, then I was expelled — after having won, I was expelled — and now, just this past April 2020, I was elected again as a member of the National Policy Committee.

And now I've been expelled again — I joined in April and I'm already expelled again, it seems. Elected, yes. And in April, a decision came down from the National Policy Committee that I had violated the DP's charter — no, actually, a ruling was issued by the Charter Committee. But it still needs the party chairman's signature to become final. As for my background, I'm an economist by profession — I graduated from the School of Economics at the National University of Mongolia and also completed a master's degree there. I also did a master's in public policy at Oxford University, and I've done more than ten years of economic research.

All right — first question. In the 2016 parliamentary election your party suffered a major defeat. After that, you and a group of young people formed a movement saying "let's renew our party," raising complaints about the leadership and proposing changes to the charter, among other things. Yes — let's start there. In general, a political party that loses an election tends to reform, improve, and move forward in some way. Political life alternates between victory and defeat, and that's exactly why political parties around the world tend to improve — it's after an election defeat that a party's internal governance gets better and it moves forward; that's the general pattern. So would you say that 2016 was, for the DP, an election defeat on one hand, but also something that opened up the possibility of reform and renewal on the other? Yes — there were many young people.

There were many young people voicing this call for reform, and I was one of them. At the time we set ourselves three big goals. The first was that the DP's ideology needed to be clarified. Especially since the 2008 election, a political party's ideology had been largely neglected, and the party had become more a union of interests than something grounded in ideology — that had become a fairly serious problem.

Second, within Mongolian politics, the DP itself is a merger of five parties, so there are real differences between the underlying ideologies of the parties that merged to form it. This needed to be clarified and consolidated once and for all — and remember, this was 16 years after 2000, that's the point. We were convinced this needed to be clarified, and that's why we worked toward renewing the party's ideology. The second direction was this: a political party is not simply an institution that exists to win elections, nor, on the other hand, is it a system that trains and grooms people from scratch. The party's most important function should be to screen and identify the personnel who will compete in state elections. And from that follows the need to regulate a party's internal governance through law and through its charter. In Mongolia, the Law on Political Parties has not really been amended — that's the law as it stands.

As far as I know, revisions to it have failed to clear the parliamentary threshold four times recently. And it's very difficult to regulate through a charter matters that aren't regulated by law. So the challenge facing DP members was this: how do you strengthen the DP's internal governance by regulating, through the charter, relations the law itself doesn't cover? That's what the DP's charter reform was about. The third goal, of course, concerned personnel — people who had previously served in DP leadership, certain politicians, needed to bear political responsibility.

So the third piece of work actually carried out under the reform was to hold these internal elections again, under governance and a charter that we ourselves had drafted. All right — so what proposals did your group of young people bring to this charter reform? Which ones, in your own view, ended up being important but were left out? This might come across more clearly if we look at it a bit historically.

We revised and reworked the draft charter twice. In the first draft, a major mistake occurred in the DP's reform process — a mistake in the process, so to speak. This mistake — I'm sorry to say — happened in the working group tasked with revising the charter, which your group of young people, myself included, was also part of. Working groups were formed at the DP's Sixth Congress to revise both the charter and the party's ideology. Unfortunately, while the charter itself was still undefined, the Sixth Congress created the conditions for holding the chairman's election without any charter in place at all.

And I think that had a fairly negative effect on the reform process that followed. Personally, I think — whoever's term got extended, got extended — because, in general, when you're reforming rules, it makes for a much better charter when it's revised by people who have no personal stake in the outcome. So having the chairman elected under those conditions became a factor that slowed down the charter reform. Still, I wouldn't want to say this was specifically Chairman Erdene's doing — anyone in his position would probably have done the same.

Once someone with a personal stake gets involved in a reform process, it's predictable that they'll try to bend the charter away from what it should be. That's just human nature, I suppose. And because of this, quite a few serious problems began to appear in the DP's charter. I'd like to split this into two issues. One part is that we made mistakes in drafting the charter ourselves, and we need to acknowledge that. What was the big mistake? Without any preliminary screening or filter of any kind, the selection of the party chairman was thrown wide open.

This opened up the chance for anyone at all to run for chairman. As you may recall, I myself put my name forward to run for DP chairman at the time and worked to raise the funds for it. What this does is create far too many candidates — which means the election ends up being one where no one can win, or even could win, a genuine majority.

And behind that, the winning chairman's legitimacy and acceptability end up being very low. Second — in our case, five people ran, including Enkh and Erdene — and what share of the vote did Chairman Erdene actually win with? You'll remember: some people were elected chairman with around 30% of the vote. Right. The second issue is that having the entire party membership elect the chairman may simply have been ahead of where our political culture's level of maturity actually was at the time.

That was one of the biggest mistakes we made in drafting the original charter. And there's another mistake on top of it. There's a party structure called the Capital City Party Committee — this too was made to be elected directly by its own members. Looking back now, that was also a very serious mistake. The Capital City Party Committee's members should be elected by the party committees of each individual district — it should be a layered, collective structure, not one directly elected by the rank and file.

Looking back today, these are the mistakes we made — with our draft charter, I think we were a bit too abstract, too romantic, without having tested any of it in practice. That turned out to be a serious mistake. These two mistakes you mention actually made it into the final charter, were approved, and put into effect. Yes — but that, as I said, is a mistake we made while drafting the charter. There are quite a few more problems in the draft as well — things that were in the initial draft but never actually got approved.

One of these: the DP chairman is elected by the entire membership, right, but the mechanism for holding him accountable afterward has disappeared. In the original draft, there was a provision that if the DP Congress held a renewed vote of confidence and found it did not have confidence in the chairman, a new election would be called. That provision has essentially vanished. That's the second point — well, this isn't the biggest mistake, but it may be the most important one.

The mistake we made concerned two bodies called the Charter Committee and the Internal Election Committee. The Charter Committee is, in essence, an oversight body. The Internal Election Committee is the body that organizes elections. If you look at the state level, it's roughly equivalent to combining an audit authority and a court into one body. The Charter Committee, and the Internal Election Committee — which is like an internal General Election Commission — for both of these DP bodies, our expectation was that people who knew the party's history and culture, who had spent their whole lives within it, and who had experience in senior state positions along with integrity, would serve — so the standard at the time was that a person had to have been a DP member for no fewer than 15 years.

On top of that, the charter allowed people who had previously held DP leadership positions to nominate themselves and then be confirmed by the Congress. Why include such a provision? So that no one could simply nominate themselves alone — they had to be confirmed by the full Congress. That's the extent of these bodies' authority. Even today, if you look at it, the General Election Commission, the Auditor General, judges — they're all elected by the State Great Khural, aren't they? Was it done on that same principle here?

Because that's exactly how you create the possibility of independent operation — it was designed on that same principle. But when the charter was actually adopted, this was substantially changed, and it was written in that these appointments would instead be approved on the chairman's recommendation. What actually happens in practice is that this makes them dependent. As soon as the chairman walks in and reads out everyone's names, the whole slate gets approved in a single vote. Today's DP Charter Committee and Internal Election Committee are bodies structured in a way that leaves them unable to operate independently — and I consider that one of our more serious mistakes.

And because of this, these structures have created — are still creating — a substantial obstacle to the DP's reform process. Because they can't operate independently, subsequent problems just keep piling up. In general, I think if we undervalue things like rules and principles that are meant to serve us over the longer term, and instead keep getting tangled up in our immediate troubles, this is exactly the kind of pattern that results. For example, when did you personally come to realize these mistakes had happened? Which month was the charter actually adopted, in 2017?

Let me think — the Seventh Congress of 2017, I believe it was around August 2017. The chairman's election followed after that. So when did you come to understand that these kinds of mistakes had crept in? I really came to understand that having the entire grassroots membership directly elect the chairman was an extremely risky move only after going through that chairman's election myself. Why? Because for the first time, money entered the DP's internal election — much the way voters in parliamentary elections effectively get paid for their votes too.

But if you look at it from the standpoint of how societies develop — especially in a democratic system — it should be a party's internal governance that leads and pulls society forward. A party's internal governance should be selecting clean, capable people the right way, without money changing hands, and only then can it pull social change forward behind it. Instead, what happened was the reverse: the very problem society needed to change came flooding straight into the political party — and that, for me personally, is where I started becoming critical. At that time, did you share this view with your colleagues? The charter hadn't yet been adopted at that point, right? Right.

So did you present and discuss your thinking with your colleagues at the time? Of course — I've consistently voiced my position on this, on two issues. There's another problem in our party's charter as well. I don't want to name the people who put it there, but there's a charter provision under which a DP member who voices views inconsistent with the leadership's position can, broadly speaking, be removed by the party's governing body, or expelled from membership altogether — and I'm sitting here right now having been expelled under precisely that provision. Right.

So this brings us to something we've largely forgotten today and don't talk about much — the very spirit of the 1992 Constitution. The biggest issue that the democratic movements of that era raised, something that must exist in any genuine democratic system, is pluralism. Pluralism means tolerating — coexisting alongside — views you may dislike, especially views the person in power dislikes; that tolerance is precisely what allows it to exist at all. So the DP — well, our DP is still, even now, the backbone of Mongolian politics. It still is. Unfortunately, we do have internal problems, but these can be resolved — it just takes time. When I say we need time to resolve this, it's because there are people with the will and the drive to do it — that's exactly why I'm saying this.

It will change. This party is the direct successor of the political forces that led Mongolia's democratic revolution. That's precisely why it has always been an institution that strives for internal openness, transparency, and collective decision-making grounded in debate and discussion. That's why, for the DP, defending this pluralism ought to put it at the forefront of Mongolian society. Now, previously, this pluralism of views you're describing — well, the DP's meetings used to basically end in shouting matches and near brawls before breaking up — that used to be the norm, right? Yes, before 2016. Did you ever come to feel this just couldn't go on?

Was there also a temptation to just set the internal squabbling aside and rally behind one strong leader, elected by the whole membership? Of course — everyone had that kind of desire. And people used to say things like "we've all been thrown into one sack like a bunch of bull horns, this can't go on." But we need to draw a careful distinction here. First, we need to correctly understand what it actually means to say "we lack unity."

Sorry, this is where you effectively split into factions. Right — first, this split showed that it wasn't really a matter of ideological or conviction-based unity dividing people into factions. In practice, there really aren't "factions" in the DP in any formal sense — but underneath what people call this "lack of unity," there was name-calling, comparing each other to pigs and dogs, cursing at one another — and that should never happen, under any circumstances. It shouldn't happen especially now, in a modern democratic system that is supposed to be developing this way. What should we actually be uniting around? First, around our ideology. Second, we need principles — for example, meetings should happen on a regular schedule, and agenda items should be announced to people in advance so they can prepare their input, and it should be clear how matters will actually be discussed at the meeting. If we had things like that in place, people wouldn't get so angry and upset.

This is supposed to be an institution that makes collective decisions. The most stable political parties in the world today share one basic trait: they meet constantly and regularly. Their meetings are scheduled well in advance, the participants are chosen properly, the underlying system is healthy, and the agenda items are clear and known ahead of time, with input already gathered. In general, a political party's activity essentially is its meetings — there are meetings at every level.

If we learn to do this properly, we won't end up back in that sack of bull horns — but trying to fix that by making one person an all-powerful chairman with unchecked authority is also the wrong way to go. We need to balance these two things, and the most important thing for us is to learn a genuine culture of decision-making, especially in political activity. All right — in 2017, when that newly organized nationwide election took place, what share of the old membership actually got replaced? Do you remember? If you compare today's National Policy Committee members with the 2016 National Policy Committee, almost 83–84% weren't there before — they're new people.

Right — as I understand it, a lot of young people came in. Yes, yes. And every year the Committee runs a rotation of around 30%, I believe. What's the criterion for that? Every member is scored, and whoever scores lowest is dropped, and a new election is held for that vacated seat. In your view, how accurately and fairly has this process actually been carried out?

This comes back again to the charter. There's another problem here. First, in our party's charter, there's a provision that of the 380 National Policy Committee members, 76 seats are reserved so that only people under 39 compete against each other for them, rather than competing across the board with older members — I think that's simply wrong. Why? I'm certainly not saying it's wrong to support young people. It's wrong because political activity isn't the kind of activity that should be defined by age.

This is about making decisions in the interest of the entire Mongolian people. Sorry — so this amounts to a fixed quota for young people, is that it? Yes — exactly. One in every five members has to be specifically reserved for young people, and likewise one in every five has to be a woman. Now, what's usually the basis for such quotas? It might be a metric considered across the full slate of candidates overall — but usually, if you look at parties in other countries, they take gender into account, to increase women's participation.

But without singling out women specifically, some countries simply require that candidates from either single gender not fall below 30% of nominees, or something along those lines — that's how the quota comes in elsewhere. Even that isn't fully in line with open, democratic principles, in my view. This is especially wrong when applied to young people, because — worldwide — one defining trait of unstable, weak governments is being made up entirely of the young. In general, in political activity, whether someone is young or not isn't really what matters. What matters is whether young people make good decisions.

Of course, young people may understand their peers a bit better. But making decisions on behalf of the whole country isn't really governed by that kind of basic factor. So this is a fairly significant mistake. Second, someone taking part in political activity should, as a basic feature of that role, hold office for a fixed term. Just as we elect members of parliament for a set four-year term, a person should be able to exercise their mandate — their "immunity," so to speak — for the full length of that term.

This holds true for internal party governance too, no different from any country with a mature democratic system. The DP's National Policy Committee members are, in principle, elected for a three-year term, and that immunity should be preserved until the three years are up. Unfortunately, this has been undermined through amendments to the charter. Rotation should happen every three years, as it should — but instead of waiting for that, changes were pushed through before the three years were even up.

Let me draw this together and tie it back to the Charter Committee. To give one example — last December, this issue came up: I pay my dues as a National Policy Committee member, but on top of that the district party organization was also asking for donations. I said, I already pay my party dues; as for whether I make an additional donation, since that's supposed to be voluntary, I said I couldn't give this time, and I didn't. As soon as I did that, using their point-scoring system, they submitted a proposal to the DP to remove me from the National Policy Committee for failing to fulfill my duties as a member — that was a year ago. So this, again, is an internal governance problem in our party.

But excuse me, let me add one thing. Even though we're both discussing problems with the DP's internal governance — plenty of things that don't work, that are broken — please don't compare this to the MPP. When I criticize the DP's activities and its internal governance, I'm not comparing it to the MPP; I'm expressing dissatisfaction by comparing it to what it ought to be — not to the state of the MPP's internal affairs, which, frankly, you can barely even compare to the DP's — it's practically a case of having no internal governance at all. All right — so why was the commission's decision to remove you from the National Policy Committee actually made? What exactly were you found at fault for, specifically? The decision itself doesn't say.

I haven't officially been given the Charter Committee's decision — it only becomes final once the DP chairman signs it. The Charter Committee has already issued its ruling, but I haven't been given clear information about it. As I understand it, this is connected to my having collected signatures from National Policy Committee members opposing the financial threshold set for candidates in the DP's internal elections — there are 380 members with voting rights, out of roughly 400 total. The goal was to gather signatures from one-third of them.

We ended up collecting signatures from about 100 members of the National Policy Committee. If we'd reached one-third, the National Policy Committee would have had to reconvene on the matter — but we didn't get there. On top of that, there are probably various other factors at play too. A major one is that during the process of selecting candidates for the next stage, that 100-million-tögrög threshold actually started being used for its real, intended purpose — and that's not acceptable. On this point, honestly, I don't fully agree even with the DP's own young members, because in a way this is also a form of refusing to accept a collective decision.

But on the other hand, if you look at it from the standpoint of conviction, it's something hard to accept. If you look at Mongolia's political life over the past 30 years, the cost of running in elections here has kept rising and rising. Today Mongolia's per-capita GDP is around $4,000. Countries with per-capita GDP at least ten times higher than ours have election costs per candidate roughly five times lower than ours.

So there's a gap here that's simply not comparable — an enormous, disproportionate difference. And behind this, honestly, it's not fair to simply blame the DP. When parliament passes election laws, it keeps consistently choosing the options that demand the highest possible spending, and as a result, political activity itself has become extremely costly. Because of that, political parties end up scrambling to find other ways to raise money, and this keeps going on, and the party ends up unable to fulfill its core function. Because, in principle, a political party is an institution that selects the best people through competition and helps them compete in state elections. But once money enters that selection process, this is simply something we cannot accept. From what you're saying, I take it that money entered the party — you mentioned five candidates competing for chairman with money involved, and now you're saying money has come up again in the current election and derailed things once more.

And organizing the whole election — 90% of the cost goes into that, doesn't it? Yes, yes, the next election, yes. So where's that money supposed to come from? In your view, where should the money to organize an election actually come from? First of all, raising money to organize the election shouldn't even be the primary goal — the first goal should be how to reduce the cost. That should be the starting point, within the bounds of the law, through amending the law where needed. To give one example of something I'm also critical of within my own party: those in power keep choosing the most expensive possible version of the election law.

First, those in power have money — the state has money. If you look at our corruption index, or the loopholes in our budget, it's clear those in power have money. So naturally they choose the option that suits deep pockets. On one hand, the DP should have opposed this. It should have opposed it, drawn public attention to the issue, criticized what those in power were doing, and, with public backing, prevented parliament from passing the election law in this form — was that possible? It was.

Unfortunately, this opportunity wasn't used — the DP didn't fully seize it within parliament. Even as a minority, this was a possible avenue, but it wasn't used. The election law got passed. After that, there's the matter of setting the spending cap — parliament sets a spending ceiling for each candidate in each constituency, and spending caps for political parties as well. There was room to get involved and exert influence here too.

There was an opportunity to lower this spending cap. But there are two sides to it: even if you lower it by law, people will still spend enormous amounts in practice regardless — but the law itself should still have been the focus, and public attention should have been focused on it. Third, there was also room to cut costs within the party itself. For example, if I were DP chairman, I'd go to the Mongolian people and say: I'm sorry, we don't have money to spend on this election — but here's how we're selecting our candidates, and here's why: because we don't want to raise huge sums and put people in debt, we've done our best, from within our own ranks, to put forward what we believe are our strongest people — please support them. If that were the message, I don't think the Mongolian people are foolish — I think they would have supported it even more.

That opportunity wasn't used either. Eventually it got to the point where I started voicing a stronger position, more publicly than before. What made me known to the wider public was a decision to take from candidates an amount equal to 50% of the spending cap. What does that mean? Well, having already taken 100 million tögrög from prospective candidates for the parliamentary election — you mean on top of that, they wanted to take even more? Yes.

On top of that, a decision was made under which contracts were signed with candidates so that an amount equal to 50% of the spending cap set by the parliamentary election law would be deposited into the accounts of the provincial and district party organizations. And then — sorry — about that 100 million tögrög taken from every prospective candidate: did the ones who ended up losing get that money back afterward? No — that's still unclear.

And is it still unclear whether tax has to be paid on it too? Right, no — it's unclear. So that has to be paid as well? Yes — and it gets taken from the candidates too. Yes, yes. But you know, looking at this decision again in relation to the party, it effectively turns into the political party itself imposing a spending floor on parliamentary candidates.

In the capital, one district alone came to around 700-some million tögrög; in some provinces it started at around 400-something million. And one of your party members, I believe it was Munkherdene — after already paying 3–400 million, he was told to pay another 3–400 on top of that. A few days ago I actually discussed this exact issue with Chairman Erdene. When I asked him directly, he said, no, that was just money needed for technical work at the district-level party organizations, the grassroots units — I told him that's not acceptable, and that we're facing very difficult choices here. Honestly, even though I'm critical of Chairman Erdene in some ways, this really is a genuinely difficult choice for him. Why? Because this election law has candidates from the same party competing directly against each other. This traces back to — sorry — the 2008 parliamentary election law: after that election we were left with the bitter lesson of July 1st, and in 2012, learning from that mistake and trying to fix it, we introduced a proportional system.

With the proportional system, one-third of all MPs were elected via the proportional list, while the remaining two-thirds went through an enlarged-constituency system in which candidates from the same party compete against one another. And this is exactly what creates cross-party collusion. It's a flaw baked into the system itself. Then in 2016, deciding this wasn't working, they shifted toward a smaller, more majoritarian system. Looking at the results across several of these elections, political parties really have grown genuinely fractured and disunited internally. This is a system that's extremely damaging to a party's maturation. And now this system has been chosen again.

As a result of this system, precisely the problem we're discussing now arises. Take Övörkhangai Province, for example: the three DP candidates nominated there might, from day one of the campaign, get into three different vehicles and head off to three different sums, because they're competing against one another. That's exactly why there's now at least an attempt to link them together financially: candidates deposit their campaign funds in advance into the party's election account for Övörkhangai Province, and then that money gets spent according to a collective decision.

That's the idea behind it, in principle. On one hand it's hard to simply blame them for it — but on the other, it's still tied to a fixed sum of money. And once that becomes mandatory, the party ends up doing something exactly equivalent to setting a spending floor for its own parliamentary candidates. So today we really need to look at this carefully. Of course, reforming political parties really is one of the hardest tasks in Mongolia's current political life.

Why? Because, first, we're trying to regulate through the charter matters the law doesn't cover. When relations are governed by charter rather than by law, the ability to impose sanctions or penalties tends to be very limited. For example, if the DP hands out money in its internal election, it's genuinely difficult to impose criminal liability, because there's no legal framework for it, and courts would very likely decline to even hear such a case. So this is an extremely difficult task — difficult given our environment, and difficult because reforming political parties really means that, first, at the level of the broader political system, the Law on Political Parties itself needs to change, and the election law needs review. Our current election law is, I'd say, the single most damaging law to Mongolian democracy, and it's just been extended and is being used to hold this election again — and it keeps fracturing political parties from within.

Yes — and this law was just passed by those currently in power. Right, passed just before this. And that harm — the internal fracturing — would apply equally to that party too, wouldn't it, since it's the same democratic process? Right. So why do you think these people chose this particular system? In my view, the reason this law was passed comes down to the split within the People's Party. Since it was already divided internally, this electoral system deepens that division. Look at the People's Party's own recent history.

There was that "32–33" faction split into two, right — "65," that's how it was. Because they likely couldn't easily reclaim their own seats from one another, they probably chose this system as a way for each side to get back at the other. And looking at past election practice, that fits too — how powerful were the party factions in 2008, how powerful in 2012. It seems to me this pattern is what keeps driving proposals for laws like this. This time, as I suspect it, the People's Party's own faction had split in two, and this electoral system opens a channel for each side to get back at the other. Same pattern again.

And you yourself just said Chairman Erdene faces an extremely difficult choice. On one side there's a provincial party organization with budget money, and on the other there's the opposition — well, whatever you want to call those currently in power. So it's not as if the DP can afford to sit there with no money at all, right? So it comes down to taking money from prospective candidates. What was your actual solution here? You mentioned earlier appealing directly to the public. Was that your answer? Yes, that's the first thing. Which brings us to today: Mongolia's political parties' approval ratings are lower than they've ever been. What's that connected to? Money — that's exactly why it keeps going this way. In fact, the two major parties' combined rating is now showing around 31–32%. I was just looking at the latest survey, so I don't know how it'll hold up going into the election.

It edges up a little, sure — but there's no hope at all of the two parties' combined rating reaching 40%. So behind that, at minimum, one reason roughly 65% of voters don't support these two parties is corruption — the money embedded in the political party system, and the resulting corruption cases and scandals. That's exactly what's behind it. So if the DP said: "we don't have money — but we've done our best to screen and put forward people who can genuinely contribute to this country's development, please support them," that message would, politically, have won more votes. On the other hand, honestly, the only real way to fight populism is policy-based politics.

We're watching populism gain ground now, and honestly, in Mongolia this is becoming genuinely alarming. But even as I criticize this, it's precisely because we lack real policy substance that this is happening — that's exactly the point. If political parties had very clear platforms and policies, and could present and explain them well, the space available for populism should shrink. If we'd worked in that direction — Mongolian society's level of education today isn't actually all that low. Compared to the average education level of American voters, for instance, Mongolian voters' education level is considerably higher, don't you think? Right. Now, you mentioned earlier — as a party member, aren't you supposed to follow the majority's decision, under the charter's own provisions?

So then why do you keep stirring up this kind of internal conflict, let's say? That's an interesting question — a tough one to answer. Yes. On one hand, as a DP member, I should follow the majority decision, right? Yes. But we need to think carefully about what kind of decision the majority actually made — that takes sound judgment. Second, this is exactly what political leadership means.

If you don't change the existing status quo, nothing changes — and that status quo, even if a majority has come to accept it as normal and it's become entrenched, if it has drifted from what it should be, someone needs to say so, point it out, and work in service of what's right. That's what I understand political leadership to mean. Of course, on a personal level, this isn't an easy decision. First you have to answer for yourself whether you have the courage to be seen as an outsider or not. Whatever happens, I consider myself to have that courage right now.

So that's exactly why, even though the National Policy Committee's decision is technically a collective one, because it doesn't align with what I believe should be the case, with my own convictions, I'm not reconciling myself to it — but on the other hand, this shouldn't become ammunition for a rival political party. Since the election is approaching, I won't be making further public statements about the DP's internal affairs — but that doesn't mean I accept the current situation, not at all. All right — as a politician, how do you see the results of this 2020 election shaping up? It looks like a lot of independent candidates are running — 208 people, I believe? How do you think the overall results will turn out?

Take Brazil's lower-house elections, for example — they run multi-seat elections similar to ours. Right now there are 35 parties represented in parliament. On top of that, nearly 20 of those parties have banded together to form a coalition government. That's a governance crisis. In general, when the number of parties holding parliamentary seats grows too large, or too many independents get elected, that tends to lead toward a governance crisis.

It leads toward instability. Today in Brazil it's gotten to the point where it's not so much politicians, but people who've become famous by some other means, who end up able to sit in parliament. I have a bit of the same worry about Mongolian politics — that we might be heading that way too. But looking at real life, independents can't actually emerge in such large numbers so easily. Take an example right in front of us: in Ulaanbaatar, nearly 60 independents are running against each other. So even though many people are willing to vote for independents, those votes end up split.

And looking at it from the other side, independent candidates have started trying to distinguish themselves by some means entirely unrelated to politics. Some by athletic talent, some by artistic talent, some just by having a louder voice — trying to stand out through some completely different quality. That has a very harmful long-term effect on national governance. And, again, this comes back to the maturity of our political system.

I'd like to add one thing: a democratic system is, frankly, an extraordinarily costly system — far more costly than other systems, a system whose costs are borne by individual citizens themselves, and it's only through the results of that expenditure that people gain their freedom. That's the kind of system it is. So the most important institution in this system is the political party. If political parties fail to mature, can't find the right financing mechanisms, and their internal operations aren't clean and healthy, a democratic system simply cannot exist. And when that's missing, substitutes start filling the gap instead.

There are two other big institutions that should exist in a democratic system but are genuinely weak here. One is civil society organizations. We tend to think of these mainly as bodies working for the public good, for society's general welfare. But that's not actually so closely tied to governance — the most important organizations are the ones representing specific interest groups, bodies with their own particular interests to defend. Take an employer association, for instance, or a professional body like a bar association or a journalists' union. The more forcefully these associations defend their own interests, the more they constrain the space available for the state to act arbitrarily. So naturally, another institution underpinning and strengthening a democratic system is the media.

Now here, unlike in other democratic countries, the state doesn't own the media — we do have what looks like a free press. But that's just surface appearance. In reality, the organizations working in Mongolia's media sector are, behind the scenes, owned by politicians. Editorial policy is directly dependent on ownership, and there's an underlying structural reason for that too. With per-capita GDP around $4,000, in a small country of only three million people, it's practically impossible for media outlets to sustain themselves and run a real newsroom purely on advertising revenue.

So we need to work to strengthen both of these institutions, and especially rethink their financing mechanisms from scratch. There aren't many countries where such efforts have actually succeeded — it's hard to point to great best-practice examples. But we have no choice but to keep thinking it through. Over the next 10 to 15 years, if we want to strengthen our democratic system, we need to work out mechanisms so that at least some money reaches these two institutions from the people themselves. You just mentioned two things —

As I see it today, media and civil-society organizations don't play much of a distinctive role anymore — it feels like this whole social-media world just puts light pressure on the state, and the state basically goes along and does its work through that channel instead. That's how it looks to me. If you look at the underlying pattern of social development, that's exactly what's happening: the most organized, most capable actors have always historically prevailed. In the media sector, for example, we should have strong, capable newsrooms. Because we don't, social networks have come to dominate instead. If we did have such newsrooms, several of them dividing up public opinion in a healthy way would be the result, rather than driving it the way it should — instead we get this chaotic, disorderly situation, I think.

That's right. There's also another idea some countries have tried — that a party like the DP, if it intends to take power, should announce in advance who the prime minister will be, and who the ministers of each ministry will be, and so on, so that a voter can factor that into their decision — and this might actually boost the DP's support. In my view that seems like quite a reasonable approach. What do you think? That depends a lot on the electoral system. In general, for parties under majoritarian systems — well, when we look at political systems, comparing countries directly like this has real shortcomings too.

I might be about to make that same mistake myself. Countries differ in that some are unitary states, some are federations — that's a huge difference. Some are multi-ethnic, others single-ethnic; some have presidential systems, others parliamentary — there are so many factors to take into account. Now, if you look at countries with majoritarian electoral systems, election outcomes basically get attributed to the party leader. In general, candidates in such elections get elected mostly by presenting the single unified platform their party has adopted, rather than as individuals — take the UK election, for instance: you barely see anyone besides Boris Johnson, right?

Right, that's very much the case. Candidates competing in lower-level constituencies aren't very visible, because that's the nature of the choice being offered — much like here. As proportional elements get introduced, questions like who will sit in the cabinet start to matter a great deal, because that carries a second layer of meaning beyond just choosing a platform — it implicitly means choosing the government too. Right, right. So in our case, well, that wouldn't be a bad thing at all.

But right now, under our majoritarian system, votes go to individual candidates — we vote for the person, right, because that person will represent us and make decisions going forward. So announcing a cabinet in advance carries a lot of the meaning of choosing the government itself. That's why this kind of competition — well, it's a bit like our current situation with the Minister of Health amid all the confusion, right? On social media there's all sorts of information circulating, true and false mixed together, impossible to tell apart. In that kind of situation, the health minister ends up right in the middle of it.

So these political attacks end up landing not on the candidate actually running, but on the cabinet appointee instead, right? So this majoritarian element and the underlying principle of choosing representation don't really fit together well. I see, right. All right — as a politician, my next question: has this coronavirus pandemic, worldwide, in some sense turned hostile toward democracy — sort of undermined it?

There does seem to be this hostile tendency emerging. Take Poland, or Hungary — Hungary especially, whatever you want to call it — this kind of tendency exists in Mongolia too. What do you think about this? There are two underlying questions here. One: when does democracy collapse, and when does it re-establish itself — or, conversely, when does a totalitarian regime collapse, and when does it take hold? That's the underlying question.

Today there are more than 190 countries in the world with some form of government. Of those, the majority have some kind of democratic system — but they haven't all traveled the same path to get there. There's one common factor when democratic systems fall into crisis and get replaced by totalitarian regimes: an economic crisis. An economic crisis generally starts out purely economic, and then becomes a social crisis, and that in turn becomes the force that changes the political system.

So an economic contraction is an extremely dangerous phenomenon. Generally speaking, during this coronavirus period, it's becoming clear that economies worldwide are contracting, that growth is disappearing. This is a vulnerability for any kind of government — a totalitarian system is just as exposed to it. In general, this tends to create the underlying conditions for a change in the form of government. That's one factor. Second, democratic systems tend to be a bit slow in the face of this kind of sudden threat.

Because, well, look at how decisions get made even in established democracies like the US and the EU — it's slow, because political matters have to go through a fairly drawn-out process before gaining political support. You can't just shut things down the way a totalitarian regime can, because this is a system built on public opinion and consensus. But still, worldwide, there are certain tendencies emerging.

What you're describing — that totalitarian regimes are responding to this pandemic much faster, that they're able to protect economic opportunities better — that tendency does exist. But no, I don't think so. As I see it, even though democratic systems are slow to decide, the real question is why they're slow. It's because they need to protect other things of value, and that takes effort — that's why they're slow.

For example, there's a genuine question about how restricting people's freedom of movement squares with the US Constitution. This might sound a bit awkward, but compared to something like a world war, or a civil war, or a regime change to authoritarianism, COVID-19 itself isn't such a huge issue by comparison. So protecting what has lasting value over the long run is the bigger goal, and that's the trade-off being made. Beyond that — it's not the countries with long, deeply established democracies, but the countries that restored democracy in the 1990s, the younger democracies, especially the ones with weak institutional development, where democratic systems are becoming very fragile.

They're becoming brittle. Again, the reason comes down to not properly understanding the value of what we have. For example, under Mongolia's own Constitution, the question of who actually holds the authority to restrict citizens' freedom of movement — we still haven't properly answered that even today. This creates room for people in positions of power to act arbitrarily, and all sorts of decisions get pushed through as a result. For instance, the Ministry of Health has declared that every confirmed case in Mongolia is under observation.

In that case, there's no basis at all for closing schools or preventing people from going to work. There's no basis at all for directly banning or restricting movement between cities. Right now they're apparently running a "drill" in Chingeltei District. The right of citizens to freedom of movement is a fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution. There may be cases where it needs restricting, but that decision should only be made by the State Great Khural. Instead, under the guise of a "drill," they're restricting the freedom of movement of an entire district's residents in the capital.

For a limited time, sure — but this is a democratic society; social life in general isn't some field exercise you can just run drills on, is it? So the question of who is making this decision, and whether that entity actually has the authority to make it, is a fundamental issue for us. We could let it slide once — but if this keeps happening, becomes normalized, and gets institutionalized as standard practice, that itself is a trajectory heading toward an increasingly deficient system. Right now they're putting "coronavirus" up front and using it to justify restricting everything — where does it end? Restricting press freedom, restricting freedom of movement, whatever it is — all sorts of things get pushed through with "coronavirus" slapped on as the headline. Looking at the bigger pattern, these kinds of forceful, coercive decisions dressed up with "coronavirus" in front really do carry a huge risk for Mongolia's democratic system. But do you have confidence that we won't slide all the way into authoritarianism?

We're a fragile democracy, after all, right? Yes, that's right — Mongolia's democracy is young. Looking back at the democratic revolution 30 years on, I'm honestly not the person qualified to render judgment on that whole historical process. But when I look back and read about what happened at the time, I do think Mongolia's democracy is the real thing — genuine. It really was an organic process that unfolded on its own, not something manufactured or imposed by any one person. It was a genuine process.

So Mongolian democracy has a relatively solid foundation. On top of that, it's had 30 years growing up, being educated, and maturing within a stable democratic system. A person who is free doesn't so easily accept an authoritarian regime being imposed on them. But there are things to worry about — especially the independence of Mongolia's judiciary, which is in a very fragile, difficult state. The political entanglement of law-enforcement bodies, especially ones with investigative functions — a lot of people can see this. It has gone beyond reasonable limits. And there are various ways a democratic system can be worn down and collapsed — for example, by mobilizing armed force to establish a military dictatorship.

But on the other hand, there's also the possibility that law-enforcement bodies end up wielding political power themselves. Or populists, once they gain state power, change the laws to remove any checks on themselves — there are various methods. From what I can see, the amount of power accumulating within our law-enforcement bodies is deeply troubling. Now — I'm sorry, I haven't personally met with Prime Minister [Khurelsükh]. This is currently going through the courts in relation to a particular case.

I don't know the rights and wrongs of it — I can't judge court proceedings from the outside. But there is one thing that genuinely doesn't sit right with principle: a person who was elected by the citizens of Mongolia, who received that authority from them, and who carried out a decision made by a legitimate state institution — the court has no authority to pass judgment on that decision. In no country's democratic system does a court have that kind of authority. A court should work only within the bounds of its own jurisdiction — ruling on whether a law was broken, not on a decision made by the State Great Khural. Only the Constitutional Court — in Mongolia, the Constitutional Tsets — rules on whether something conforms to the Constitution, and strikes it down if it doesn't; it doesn't convict a person.

If someone ends up on trial for having made a political decision, a policy decision, then in Mongolia this effectively means that policy decisions — whose entire basis is the will of the Mongolian people — become impossible to carry out in real life. This means, in effect, that all power reverts back into the hands of the judiciary, one of the state's three branches — and that's exactly why, even 250 years after the fact, the fundamental principles of democracy that Locke and Montesquieu spoke of remain just as valuable today, we believe. All right, thank you.

Thank you — our program's time is up. Thank you for accepting our invitation, coming to our studio, and sharing your views with us this way. Thank you, and I wish you every success in your work ahead — thank you. Dear viewers, today's program ends here. Until we meet again in our next episode, goodbye for now.