Mongolia’s Next PM: Media Mentions of Possible PM Nominees

By Marissa J. Smith and Julian Dierkes

With L Oyun-Erdene’s resignation as prime minister, obviously, there is a lot of speculation and media mentions of possible PM nominees whom the MPP might nominate to succeed him.

Before we look at that speculation, just a quick reminder that the choice of PM is unlikely to have a significant impact on policies. Yes, “Vision 2050” will likely wane as a touchstone document that has to motivate all decisions, but that’s partly because it never actually motivated any particular decisions.

To summarize the speculation in the Mongolia media, let’s look at the frequency with which names are mentioned. We do this relying on the “Politics” sections of the June 4 and June 5 editions (which includes articles published between June 3 and June 5)  of Robert Ritz’ Mongol Beat AI-generated selection and translation of news articles drawing on the following publications: news.mn, isee.mn, unuudur.mn, ikon.mn, montsame.mn. While there are clear limitations to this procedure in the selection of sources to include, i.e. the AI-generated selection of articles, we believe it is useful for putting together a snapshot of who is getting mentioned as a possible candidate.

After feeding a text (.txt) file of all “Politics” articles from Mongol Beat for June 4 and June 5 and a comma-separated list of the names of all MPs into an on-device LLM (Llama 3.2 3B Instruct, using Nomic AI’s GPT4All software), Marissa prompted “Who is being considered for the PM position?” She also utilized Python to enumerate occurrences of names of all current MPs in the .txt file. The number of mentions found using Python (table below) correlated well with the names suggested by the LLM. She searched the text for where these names occurred and identified four articles by three different publications specifically addressing the question of who will be the next Prime Minister. These were then given a close reading.

The four articles are: “Who Will Be the Next Prime Minister?,” “An Agreement Has Been Made to Choose the Next Prime Minister From the Generation of the 1970s, with Candidates Including B.Battsetseg, J.Enkhbayar, and G.Zandanshatar Being Discussed,” “Who is the Prime Minister Who Won’t “Play Games With The Country?” ,” “The MPP Leadership Council Will Meet Today to Select the Next Prime Minister.”

Prospective PMs (including Zandanshatar, long-time MP, but didn’t win a seat in 2024) with more than one mention, in more than one article, include:

As perhaps best indicated by the headline, “An Agreement Has Been Made to Choose the Next Prime Minister From the Generation of the 1970s,” the list of candidates include established MPP politicians. Several are ministers, and only one is a woman (Battsetseg).

There have been some discussions in the media that the next PM might be the return of the 1970s generation. Recall that Oyun-Erdene’s ascent to PM was seen as the arrival/takeover of the generation of politicians born in the 1980s. They were championed by the 1960s politicians in the MPP cadre tradition of alternating decades of politicians taking over. Current discussions are that perhaps the 1970s are back. Not with bellbottoms, but with 6 of the candidates whispered about having been born in the 1970s.

We will continue to monitor these conversations and update on the blog as we are able!