On paper, the Mongolian state is becoming richer, with record exports, higher budget revenues, and decent rates of growth. Yet in daily life, it feels absent. Six years after winter protests that fused discontent over air pollution and corruption into a single story about trust or the lack of it, that story has only thickened.
Since then, Mongolia has moved from outrage over theft of public resources to open constitutional crisis. In October of last year, parliament voted to remove Prime Minister Zandanshatar Gombojav barely four months into his term.
Three days later, the president vetoed the dismissal on constitutional grounds. Tsets, Mongolia’s constitutional court, deemed the president’s veto lawful, ruling that a parliamentary motion passed by the State Great Khural to dismiss the PM violated several procedural and constitutional principles.
If Western media outlets notice any of this, they tend to reach for the easy frame. Earlier in 2025, Britain’s Times ran a breathless piece about a “Putin-aligned” President who had supposedly orchestrated a coup of sorts against a US-educated reformist prime minister, Oyun-Erdene Luvsannamsrai. That story missed the point.
Mongolians themselves didn’t read the crisis that way. They watched as food, fuel, and rent grew more expensive while politicians flaunted imported SUVs and designer-brand watches. They saw “anti-corruption” hearings that always seemed to stop just short of the people who designed the schemes.
If there was a coup, it didn’t take place over a single night in Ulaanbaatar. It was a much slower takeover, organized through coal contracts, logistics queues, and parliamentary lists.
In theory, Mongolia is a parliamentary democracy with a democratic constitution, the separation of powers, and institutions that look very familiar to anyone raised on the liberal textbook: parliament, president, cabinet, anti-corruption agency, independent central bank. In practice, politics has settled into…
Auteur: Sanchir Jargalsaikhan
