The Purse and the Fury: A Dior Bag Brings Down Mongolia’s Government

When the Mongolian prime minister’s son posted photos of his extravagant lifestyle, he was doing what young people across the world do – bragging on social media.

But he probably didn’t intend those images of expensive cars, vacations, clothing, diamonds, and Dior bags to go viral and set off weeks of furious protests, forcing the government to its knees.

But that’s what happened after young Mongolians began wondering how the 23-year-old Temuulen had accumulated such wealth, particularly because Prime Minister Oyun-Erdene Luvsannamsrai has also long played up his modest rural roots.

Those thousands of angry demonstrators said such displays show the disconnect between the arrogant ruling elite and the average Mongolian, who is struggling to get by, while highlighting the vast problem of corruption in the country.

“With no visible sources of income, their display of luxury bags, private travel, and high-end living was a blatant slap in the face to the average Mongolian citizen,” Amina, 28, a protester, told CNN. “The cost of living in Mongolia has skyrocketed – many people are paying nearly half of their monthly income in taxes while barely making enough to cover food, rent, or utilities. Most are not living paycheck to paycheck anymore – they’re living loan to loan, debt to debt.”

Last week, as a result of the fury, Oyun-Erdene resigned.

Insisting he had done nothing wrong and that both he and his son would cooperate with the anti-corruption agency investigating their financials, the prime minister, who was reelected in 2024 for his second term, stepped down after he lost a vote of confidence in the legislature.

Mongolia, a landlocked country of 3.5 million people wedged between China and Russia, has vast amounts of mineral wealth such as coal, copper, gold, and uranium, even as its population struggles with poverty and skyrocketing inflation.

At the same time, it has long grappled with corruption: Over the past decade, numerous protests have ignited over allegations that government officials and the business elite have gotten rich from siphoning off public funds and, even when caught, are rarely punished.

The 2024 Freedom House’s Freedom in the World index describes corruption, particularly involving the mining industry, as “endemic in Mongolia.” It added that the country’s anticorruption laws “are vaguely written and infrequently enforced.”

The US has targeted Mongolian officials for graft, too: For example, in 2024, the US Attorney’s Office filed a complaint to confiscate two New York apartments bought by former Mongolian Prime Minister Batbold Sükhbaatar after they were allegedly paid for by “diverted proceeds from lucrative mining contracts” and bought in order to “launder money.”

Still, analysts say there is an irony to protesters calling for Oyun-Erdene to resign over corruption allegations: His coalition government had been attempting to diversify the economy, which is dependent on mining, and break the hold of mining oligarchs. In April 2024, Mongolia passed the Sovereign Wealth Fund law, which would take a 34 percent stake in mines considered to have strategic mineral deposits and redistribute a portion of the profits into financial assistance, healthcare, education, and housing, according to the Mongolian news agency, Montsame. He had also pledged to halve the poverty rate to 15 percent by the end of the decade.

Even as some voters recognized and applauded these efforts, the country’s mining elite, however, have not been happy, and analysts believe they are behind the fall of the government. The prime minister himself warned of a “spider’s web” of special interests as he resigned, saying that “there has been a deliberate attempt to undermine” the reforms of the coalition government by a “hostile campaign” that would “turn Mongolia away from a parliamentary democracy and return power and wealth to a small group driven by self-interest.”

Now, some worry over the future of Mongolia’s democracy: A single-party communist state until its revolution in 1990, it became a parliamentary democracy but has a long history of political instability. Analysts say it must fix that issue if it wants to attract more investment and diversify its economic and foreign policy away from its dependence on China and Russia.

“When it took office, the coalition government was a fresh face for Mongolia,” wrote analyst Bolor Lkhaajav in the Diplomat. “Protests are a healthy democratic function, where the youth assemble and voice their concerns. However, there are still reasonable grounds for concern over the stability of the Mongolian government amid opportunistic political shenanigans.”