PM Zandanshatar

By Julian Dierkes

So, Mongolia has a new prime minister. Parliament elected G Zandanshatar in the early hours of June 13. Initial reporting indicated that only 108 members were present, but it seems to have turned out that 108 members was the number of MPs that supported him out of 117 present. As has happened in the past, it is frustrating how imprecise the information coming via Mongolian media sites often is in these kind of situations.

As I would have predicted, Zandanshatar has previously graced the pages of our blog:
We first mentioned him in a post listing candidates in the 2012 election. He was not reelected as an incumbent from Bayankhongor in that election. With that post, he has been mentioned by name 12 times in our posts. Most recently, he showed up in Marissa and my post last week, listing candidates who were getting frequent mentions in the Mongolian media.

You can also find Zandashatar on Insta.

As a politician, he is most notable to me for the following reasons:

1. Not only not a current MP, but lost election in District 1 in 2024
2. Born in 1970
3. Relatively quiet as speaker from 2019-2024, not associated with any particular policy arena
4. Rare – esp. for MPP politicians – democratization initiative in 2017

Zandanshatar was not elected in 2024 election

The Mongolian constitution does not require any particular qualifications to be nominated or elected by parliament as the prime minister. Mongolia is similar to some parliamentary democracies in not specifying that the PM must be an MP, but there are others where this is required.

Prior to Zandanshatar, the most prominent PM who was not an MP at the time would have have been Ts Elbergdorj, when he became prime minister in Aug 2004 and served until Jan 2006. During this time, he tried to run in a by-election in Aug 2005 but the MPRP, his coalition partner, prevented him from doing so. He headed up a grand coalition of DP and MPRP. Of course, he had previously served as PM when he was also an MP in 1998, and subsequently to his second term as PM became president from 2009-17.

[Apologies to early readers: when I had initially scanned the lists of PMs, two names escaped as not being MPs at the time. My only excuse is that they were/are such prominent politicians that their lack of a seat in parliament did not occur to me. My thanks to an alert reader for letting me know.]

There were two other prominent MPP PMs who were not MPs at the time. When U Khurelsukh became PM in 2017, he was not an MP but was elected in 2020 to continue on as PM until 2021. S Bayar became PM in 2007, was elected as MP in 2008 and served until 2009.

Zandanshatar was an MP previously, from 2004-2012 and again, 2016-2024.

In 2024, as an incumbent and the incumbent speaker of parliament, he ran for election in District 1, Arkhangai, Uvurkhangai and Bayankhongor. He came in 1oth in voting in the 9-member district with 53,649 votes behind D Tsogtbaatar who received 55,935 votes, so Zandanshatar lost by 2,300 votes. In an enlarged parliament it is difficult for me to imagine that having lost in the election puts Zandanshatar in a particularly powerful position to lead the government.

Revenge of the 70s

I am not aware that Zandanshatar has a fondness for bell bottoms or floral print shirts, but he was born in 1970 (and is thus my age). That is significant because Oyun-Erdene’s ascent to the premiership was interpreted by many (including Bolor L and me) as a generational turnover to MPP leaders championed by the 1960s and born in the 1980s, 1980 in Oyun-Erdene’s case. Most of the rumoured candidates for the premiership were born in the 1970s, as Marissa and I noted some days ago. This “revenge of the 70s” is most likely a sign of factional deals and another indication of a loss of intraparty power by Oyun-Erdene and his associates.

Quiet Speaker

Zandanshatar was speaker for roughly five years. I would classify his term as relatively quiet. Unlike some of his predecessors, he did not spring many surprises on parliament and the public. This may have been aided by this being the highpoint of MPP supermajorities, MPs thus requiring relatively little reigning in, though I have also previously noted the surprising challenges associated with a supermajority.

I also do not associate Zandanshatar with any particular policy field or any particular proposals.

If his ascent is the result of factional bargaining, giving him a relatively weak personal mandate, and there are no areas of particular interest to him, this would add further to my sense that whatever government he appoints will not substantially differ from the previous one.

Deliberative Pollster for Democracy

However, there is one aspect of Zandanshatar’s trajectory that has made him noteworthy as the only initiator of any activities that are aimed at deepening democratization among MPP politicians through his efforts to institutionalize deliberative polling. While this may have also carried an element of mutual aggrandizing between Zandanshatar and Stanford academics, it was a genuine attempt in 2017 at deepening democratization. For more background on deliberative polling see Stanford’s Deliberative Democracy Lab and don’t be too put off by the Trademark attached to the term “deliberative polling®”. While you are on their site, you might also note that Stanford Prof. Fishkin was awarded the Friendship Medal by none other than Zandanshatar at an Ulaanbaatar conference on deliberative polling this May.

The implementation of deliberative polling in 2017 under the leadership of Zandanshatar always seemed very much like a personal pet project of his to me. For a deeper sense of the merits of this attempt and its criticism, see Fishkin/Zandanshatar’s portrayal and constitutional legal scholar O Munkhsaikhan’s criticism. At this point and even though the deliberative polling law remains on the books, I would argue that this experiment has had none to very little impact either on democratization, nor on specific policy.

However, despite my skepticism about the implementation of deliberative polling, I do note Zandanshatar’s explicit efforts on behalf of democratization and would hope that he would continue on the basis of similar convictions at a time of global democratic backsliding and concerns about the actions of the Oyun-Erdene government in this regard.

Kind of curious to note that the other PM who was not MP (Elbegdorj) is also the architect of another democratization initiative, citizen halls.

Conclusion

I do find it somewhat surprising that Zandanshatar has been chosen as PM despite not having won his seat in parliament last summer. I have a hard time imagining that this puts him into a strong position as incoming PM and thus have no reason to believe that he would depart from the policies of the previous government in any significant way.