The country currently counts 31 registered political parties on the rolls of the Supreme Court, a tally that reflects years of steady winnowing under the Law on Political Parties. But that number may be about to hit a wall, and the debate over what comes next is heating up.
At the heart of the controversy lies Subsection 19.1.2 of the Constitution, which requires that a political party be formed through the association of citizens numbering no less than one percent of the country’s eligible voters. The clause was adopted back in 2019, but lawmakers built in a grace period, delaying its implementation until January 1, 2028. With that deadline now looming on the horizon, the provision has come roaring back into the spotlight, drawing renewed scrutiny from politicians and analysts alike.
Under the law as it stands today, founding a political party requires nothing more than a registry of at least 801 members, a relatively modest bar to clear. Come 2028, however, that threshold will balloon overnight to one percent of the total electorate, translating to more than 20,000 signatures. It is a 20-fold leap, and critics argue it will land like a sledgehammer on the country’s political landscape.
Opposition to the change has not been shy about making itself heard. Detractors warn that the amendment risks strangling the right to freedom of association, effectively pulling the rug out from under would-be political movements before they can even get off the ground. Others go further, framing the shift in generational terms and accusing the state of robbing future generations of the very democratic openness their predecessors fought to secure. Whether the higher bar will end up thinning the herd of Mongolia’s political parties, or simply raising the stakes for those with the organisational muscle to clear it, remains to be seen. What is clear is that as the 2028 deadline draws closer, the fight over who gets a seat at the political table is only just beginning.
‘Deal’ that brought 50,000 down to size
The roots of this constitutional amendment trace back to 2019, when two separate camps put forward proposals: a group of MPs led by D.Lundeejantsan and then President Kh.Battulga. The version that eventually became law was stitched together from these overlapping drafts during deliberation. But the specific proposal to raise the bar for founding a political party belonged squarely to the president. In the draft he submitted on July 16 of that year, Kh.Battulga proposed that “no fewer than 50,001 eligible Mongolian citizens must unite to form a political party,” further stipulating that any such party operate on a nationwide basis. Where that precise figure came from, or what calculation underpinned it, has never been fully explained.
Political scientist E.Gerelt-Od offered a plausible theory, saying, “It appears that in 2012, a regulation was introduced in a Russian region requiring the collection of signatures from at least 50,000 citizens to establish a political party. Kh.Battulga likely drew inspiration from this.” He added that Russia later scrapped the provision itself. Tellingly, Kh.Battulga never offered a rationale of his own, nor did he point to any supporting research when he first floated the number.
As the amendment took shape, political parties, researchers and civil society representatives were all brought into the drafting process, at least on paper. Delegates from smaller parties and researchers sitting on the working group pushed back hard against the proposed threshold, but their objections went nowhere. Instead of scrapping the figure, the parliamentary working group simply took the edge off it, arriving at the version now enshrined in law. With more than two million citizens of voting age in the country, one percent works out to somewhere between 21,000 and 25,000 people, still nearly 30 times the current 801-member threshold.
It is worth pausing on the political backdrop of the time. In 2019, the Mongolian People’s Party (MPP) commanded an overwhelming majority in Parliament, while the presidency was held by a nominee of the rival Democratic Party (DP). So although the president, a figure meant to stand above party lines and embody national unity, had pushed to set the bar as high as 50,001 members, it was the MPP-dominated Parliament that ultimately “graciously” talked the number down to just over 20,000. Representatives of so-called third-force parties, along with independent analysts, see little to celebrate in this outcome. In their reading, the provision was tailor-made to protect the interests of the establishment parties. Smaller players were given a token seat at the table during the constitutional debate, but the big two called the shots from start to finish. There was one concession worth noting: after pushback from smaller parties over the nationwide-operation clause, the wording was softened so that a party need only “advance and work on policies of national scope,” rather than function nationwide outright.
How many parties can actually reach the 1% bar?
The numbers on the ground do little to inspire confidence that the higher threshold is workable. Under the current law, political parties must submit financial reports to the General Election Commission twice a year and disclose them publicly, and those reports paint a telling picture. MPP, the country’s largest, claims 316,735 members, yet its own filing shows the party collected just 38,877 MNT in membership dues in 2025. Party membership splits into “ordinary” and “elected” categories, and the MPP brought in 1.09 million MNT in dues from elected members alone. In the first half of this year, the ordinary membership dues line sat empty, with only 431,000 MNT collected from elected members. DP fares somewhat better by comparison. Despite listing 201,000 members, it collected 2.6 million MNT in dues over the same six-month stretch, suggesting opposition members are pulling their weight more than their ruling-party counterparts. Even so, the sums barely register against the scale of either party’s claimed membership.
Setting aside the sheer difficulty of rounding up 21,000 to 25,000 members to launch a new party, the picture becomes even starker when held up against the parties already sitting in Parliament. Financial reports filed with the General Election Commission show the Mongolian Green Party, a member of the National Coalition, reporting 25,000 members, while the Mongolian National Democratic Party (MNDP) reports just 2,300. The HUN Party, for its part, claims 30,000 members on paper but reports a mere 1,800 in practice. In other words, several parties currently holding seats in Parliament would not clear the very bar now being set for newcomers.
That disconnect raises an obvious question: where exactly would a fledgling party dig up that many members from scratch? Chairman of the MNDP B.Tsogtgerel put it bluntly, “We might manage to scrape together the required number of party members to meet the threshold somehow. But would we pass the verification stage? After all, the people handling these tasks usually have backgrounds linked to the MPP.” He pointed to Russia’s presidential election as a cautionary tale, recalling how one candidate gathered 2.1 million signatures against a two-million threshold, only to be disqualified when 200,000 of those signatures were ruled invalid or the underlying data flawed. There is no guarantee that something similar couldn’t happen here, he warned.
The trouble, critics note, starts well before any membership count comes into play. Registering with the Supreme Court is already an uphill climb under the Law on Political Parties, with application materials routinely bounced back four or five times over revisions to a party’s charter and platform. The Libertarian Party, the most recent group to gain official status, spent nearly three years fighting through repeated rejections before finally securing registration last March, a saga that drew its own share of accusations that the Court was acting arbitrarily or throwing up unnecessary hurdles. Layer a 21,000-to-25,000-member requirement on top of that, and the verification process alone could drag on for years, critics say, in a system already hamstrung by vague legal language and suffocating red tape.
Member of Parliament J.Zoljargal did not mince words on the subject. “The constitutional requirement for mass membership drives young people away and shuts the door on their political participation. This provision effectively serves only to preserve the established parties. It amounts to robbing future generations of democracy,” he said. His office has since convened a discussion titled “The Right to Freedom of Association” to tackle the issue head-on. Lawyers, researchers and representatives from civil society and political parties who took part were of one mind: the provision, as it stands, ought to be repealed.
Ambiguous word
The wrinkle here is definitional, and it may prove just as consequential as the numbers themselves. Political parties typically draw a line between “members” and “supporters,” yet neither term features anywhere in the Constitution, which relies instead on the vague phrase “associate to form”. With no statutory definition of what counts as a “member,” and no regulations in place for verifying the number of associates behind a new party, some researchers argue it is too early to sound the alarm over stifled party formation or curtailed rights.
The contrast with existing law is striking. Subsection 12.3.6 of the current Law on Political Parties spells out, in granular detail, what registering 801 members actually requires: clan name, patronymic, given name, civil registration number, residential address, phone number, email address and signature, all of it subject to verification and scrutiny. The constitutional amendment, by comparison, offers none of this scaffolding. Exactly how a group would go about proving that its associates amount to one percent of eligible voters remains anyone’s guess. For now, the working assumption among observers seems to be that lawmakers will simply “come up with something” as the 2028 deadline draws closer, leaving the finer points to be sorted out under pressure rather than settled in advance.
No other country sets the bar this high
The nine-year delay between adoption and implementation was not an accident of scheduling. It emerged only after researchers on the working group, and most pointedly the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and the Venice Commission, pressed the issue in official letters, buying time that has now nearly run out.
Placed alongside international practice, Mongolia’s trajectory looks increasingly like an outlier. Few countries set a firm membership threshold for founding a political party at all, and those that do tend to keep the bar symbolic rather than punishing: 50 members in Bulgaria, 15 in Poland, 5,000 in Finland, 500 in Austria and Thailand. Even at the high end, the ceiling internationally tops out around 5,000. Germany, a country Mongolian politicians frequently cite as a model, imposes no such threshold whatsoever. Measured against the European average, the existing requirement of 801 members already sits on the high side. Mongolia, by contrast, stands entirely alone in pushing that figure up to somewhere between 21,000 and 25,000, a threshold with no real peer anywhere in the world.
Young people remain free, of course, to organize around shared beliefs and form associations of all kinds. But a political party is the only type of non-governmental organization legally permitted to engage in political activity, which makes party formation the sole avenue for climbing into the decision-making arena. When the law throws up a barrier this steep, it does not merely raise the bar, it effectively locks the door. There is something almost self-contradictory, even irrational, about a democracy enshrining freedom of expression, speech and association in its Constitution while simultaneously engineering ways to choke off the exercise of those very rights.
Critics see a clear throughline that driven by a desire to entrench their own dominance, MPP and DP have quietly written into the Constitution a provision that raises the drawbridge against any new political force. The vagueness of the language does nothing to soften that reading, and if anything, ambiguity of this kind tends to serve those already in power rather than hinder them. The intent, as many see it, was never in doubt to restrict and obstruct the right to organize. Unless the provision is walked back before it takes full effect, Mongolia risks turning what should be a democratic safeguard into a source of international embarrassment.
