Mongolians Vote to Return Government to Communists

Frustrated with painful reform and disgusted with government corruption, Mongolians have turned to the political force that represents the stability they long for: the former communists.

But the overwhelming victory of the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party over the reformist government in Sunday’s parliamentary elections won’t mean a return to Soviet-style economics, party leaders said.

“We cannot afford to go back,” Nambaryn Enkhbayar, the next expected prime minister, said in an interview before the vote. “We cannot survive if we go back.”

An unofficial tally Monday showed Enkhbayar’s party winning a stunning 72 of the 76 seats in Mongolia’s unicameral parliament. The government was expected to release official returns today.

Despite that victory, most Mongolians don’t want to delve too far into the MPRP’s past.

Mongolia became a people’s republic under Bolshevik influence in 1921, and the precursor of the MPRP established total control. The party changed to its current name and declared the world’s second communist country in 1924.

The 1930s brought forced collectivization of land. Buddhist monks were slaughtered and their land confiscated. Private business was banned.

Though the regime softened somewhat in the 1950s, Mongolia was firmly in the Soviet sphere until the Soviet Union started to falter and a peaceful populist movement brought down hard-line communism in Mongolia in 1990.

While few voters seemed to yearn for a return to the old days, the rapid pace of change since the end of communism has been tough on Mongolia--making many nostalgic for the stability of years past.

Though Mongolia has emerged from the fuel shortages and empty store shelves of the early 1990s, the rapid pace of change has taken its toll.

Street children spend the winters sleeping next to subterranean hot-water pipes to keep warm in the capital, and more than one-third of the population lives below the poverty line. Unemployment is 65% in some towns.