Mongolia's Democratic Revolution
In December 1989 a few hundred people gathered outside the Youth Cultural Centre in Ulaanbaatar to demand political pluralism. Through the winter the demonstrations grew, and in March 1990 ten activists began a hunger strike on Sukhbaatar Square in front of the government palace. The Politburo of the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party — in power without interruption since 1921 and closely bound to Moscow for the whole of that period — resigned rather than order force against them. What followed was unusual for its restraint on both sides. The party did not collapse; it removed the constitutional clause guaranteeing its leading role, legalised opposition parties, and contested multi-party elections in July 1990, which it won. A new constitution in 1992 established a parliamentary republic with a directly elected president. The former ruling party lost power in 1996 and accepted the result, then returned by election later — the alternation that distinguishes a transition from a rebranding. The economic price was severe. Soviet subsidies had reached roughly a third of Mongolian GDP, and their withdrawal produced a collapse in output, the loss of guaranteed export markets and years of shortages. That Mongolia's democratic institutions survived this shock, while resource-rich states with far gentler landings did not, is the point of interest: the sequence here ran from political opening to economic hardship, not the reverse.
- Year: 1990 CE
- Category: Political
