By Julian Dierkes
Beyond the DP’s success, the second great surprise (to me) of the election results was that the Civil Will Green Party re-entered parliament with four seats and the National Coalition gained four seats on its first attempt.
Of course, the threshold to gain seats via the party list meant that a single member was mathematically impossible while a two-seat share was improbable. CWGP and NC also benefitted from the equal redistribution of the over 200,000 votes cast for parties that did not clear the minimum thresholds. The 41,555 re-distributed seats (per party/coalition that passed the threshold) were thus a boost of more than 50% to the votes case for CWGP and NC while they had a proportionally much lower impact on KhUN, DP or MPP tallies. The four seats for both of these parties are thus close to the minimum representation made possible by the new system. However, it should still be acknowledged that those parties both garnered over 70,000 votes or just over 5%.
Note that the New Unified Coalition (Шинэ нэгдсэн эвсэл) just barely missed clearing the threshold of 5% (4.8%). Had that coalition received only 2,000 or so more votes, the redistributed votes would have dropped to around 20,000 (207,000 – 74,000 = 133,000 / 6 = 22,000), likely giving CWGP and NC only three seats rather than the current four, though that calculation is obvious hypothetical and I have not performed it to the last decimal place to come up with a precise estimate.
How many more Shine campaigners might have been needed to gain those 2,500 votes?
But in terms of the evaluation of the success of these two parties, I take note that the nature of the proportional system in the version adopted by the Mongolian parliament coupled with the particular configuration and the large number of votes cast for parties/coalitions not represented (nearly 14.3% of votes) led to the relative strong showing for CWGP and NC in terms of seats.
Civil Will Green Party
When I look through my photo collection from this election, I did not take a single photo of CWGP during the campaign. That is not representative of their presence, of course, but rather of the lack of attention I paid to CWGP.
With the departure from politics by former CWGP leader S Oyun, the party had no longer played a visible role, at least not to me. Glancing at their platform, there seemed to be nothing that particularly stood out about their appeal.
Yet, in driving across Tov, Arkhangai and Khuvsgul ahead of the election, we did see sporadic CWGP flags and signage in most soums, suggesting that there is some ongoing organizational presence.
In the end, however, as with the surprisingly strong result of the DP, I would speculate that it is name recognition that drove CWGP’s success. Not name recognition of any particular candidates, but rather a familiarity with the party name from its previous stints in parliament. Contributing to this name recognition may have also been D Enkhbat’s nomination and strong showing in the 2021 presidential election. While he had been nominated by KhUN at the time, he may still be somewhat associated with CWGP from his time in the 2008-2012 MP for CWGP.
National Coalition
Given the prominence of N Nomtoibayar, the National Coalition’s success was perhaps less surprising, but four seats was a strong showing. Nomtoibayar has been visible, though also notorious, on the national political stage for some years, guaranteeing him some name recognition by voters. In an election that largely was constructed as us (opposition) vs. them (MPP), Nomtoibayar’s notoriety may have made him a plausible foil to MPP dominance. While the Coalition was also present across the countryside, given its recent formation, I struggle to find any other explanation for its success beyond Nomtoibayar’s notoriety. His wealth may have also supported the recruitment of some credible candidates as well as the availability of funding for campaign activities.
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