Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj
Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj was president of Mongolia from 2009 to 2017 and twice prime minister before that, in 1998 and from 2004 to 2006, the young army journalist who read out the democratic movement's demands on Sükhbaatar square in December 1989. He became the first head of state the country had elected from outside the former communist party. He was the son of herders from Khovd. He trained as a military journalist in Lviv, edited the army newspaper, founded the Democratic Union in 1989 at twenty-six. He was one of the thirteen who began the hunger strike of March 1990 that made the politburo resign. He sat in the first democratic parliament, founded the first independent newspaper, wrote the constitution of 1992 with the others. He went to the University of Colorado and to Harvard's Kennedy school between the governments he led. Both fell within months, the first to a casino licence scandal in 1998 and the second to a vote of no confidence in 2006. The presidency was the mining boom and the argument about it. There was the Oyu Tolgoi copper and gold mine, the largest in the world, whose agreement with Rio Tinto he signed in October 2009 and reopened in 2013. By then the growth of seventeen per cent had collapsed with the coal price and the tugrik with it. There were the Tavan Tolgoi coal that never found its buyer, and the third neighbour policy of befriending America, Japan and Korea against the two that touch the border. There were the troops sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, the Dalai Lama received in November 2016, for which China closed the border and he apologised. There were the moratorium on the death penalty he declared in 2010 and the abolition parliament passed in 2015, and the ex-president Enkhbayar jailed in 2012 for corruption, which the Democratic Party's enemies called what it was. He won the election of 2009 by four points and that of 2013 by eight. He was term-limited in 2017. He has run the Elbegdorj Institute and sat on the international boards since. He is the country's democrat abroad while his party lost, at home, everything it had held. He was born in Zereg, in Khovd, the eighth son. The democracy he read out is still standing. That is not what happened to the others declared in 1989.
- Lived: 1963 CE – ?
- Nationality: Mongolian
- Roles: president, prime minister, politician
