Mongolian People's Party
몽골 인민당
The oldest political party in Mongolia, founded as a communist party by Mongolian revolutionaries in 1920. After leading the Mongolian Revolution of 1921 it ruled the Mongolian People's Republic as a one-party state under the name Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party until 1990. After the democratic revolution of 1990 it became a party competing in a multi-party system, and in 2010 it restored its original name and adopted social democracy.
In depth
Under the occupation by Chinese Beiyang government troops in 1919, two underground resistance groups emerged: the Consular Hill group, including Bodoo and Choibalsan, and the East Khüree group, including Danzan and Sükhbaatar. The two groups united as the Mongolian People's Party on 25 June 1920 and sent Danzan and Choibalsan to the Soviet Union, where they negotiated in Irkutsk in August. According to the English source, the party was formally founded at Kyakhta on 1 March 1921 and formed the People's Provisional Government; the Mongolian source says that the meeting of 1–3 March 1921, which elected a Central Committee and adopted a programme, gave the organisation the full character of a political party.
On 18 March 1921 Sükhbaatar's People's Militia defeated the Chinese forces at Kyakhta, and Mongolian guerrillas and the Red Army defeated Baron Ungern's White forces, entered the capital on 6 July and declared independence on 11 July. On the advice of the Comintern the party renamed itself the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, in 1924 according to the English source and in 1925 according to the Mongolian source.
From 1928 the party turned sharply left, forcibly collectivising livestock, banning private trade and transport, and attacking monasteries and the nobility. More than seven million head of livestock died, an uprising broke out in 1932 and was crushed in October by Mongolian and Soviet troops. The fabricated Lkhümbe Affair of 1933 led to the purge of more than 1,500 people, and after Prime Minister Genden was removed in 1936 and executed in the Soviet Union, Choibalsan took power. In 1937–1939, 25,437 people were officially arrested and 20,099 executed, with actual victims estimated at 35,000 to 100,000; more than 18,000 of them were lamas.
After Choibalsan died in 1952, Tsedenbal took power, purged his rivals, deepened cooperation with the Soviet Union and sided with it in the Sino-Soviet split. In August 1984 Tsedenbal was forced into retirement in a Soviet-sponsored move and was succeeded by Batmönkh. The first pro-democracy demonstration took place on 10 December 1989, and after the Mongolian Democratic Union's hunger strike of 7 March 1990, Batmönkh dissolved the Politburo and resigned on 9 March. According to the Mongolian source, the constitutional clause on the party's leading role was dropped at this time.
In the first multi-party election of 1990 the party won 357 of the 430 seats in the People's Great Khural, and a new constitution was adopted in 1992. It lost a parliamentary election to the opposition for the first time in 1996 and joined the Socialist International in 2003. At the 26th Congress in 2010, with 99.3% of delegates in favour, it restored the name Mongolian People's Party and shifted to social democracy. In response, former president Enkhbayar founded a new party under the name Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party that year; the two parties reunited in 2021. The party returned to power in 2016 and kept its majority in the 2020 and 2024 elections.