A friend who has been attending protests since 1995 said this one felt completely different — and I understood exactly what he meant when I got there.
“There was singing. An actual program with music. People sat and listened to speakers — genuinely listened, not out of obligation. Nobody was bored. Nobody was performing anger for a camera. Then the counter-protesters arrived. The crowd did not react. Some of the young organizers walked over and started actual conversations with them: ‘We understand you. This isn't your fault.’ Times have changed. This generation is different.”
That is exactly what I saw too. Something in the texture of it was new.
What the Night Meant
My partner and I left our son with his grandmother — multiple times throughout the week. We would take an hour from the market, drop him off, go stand in the square, stay until the crowd dispersed, and get home around midnight.
We did not regret a single hour of it.
That morning after — when Oyun-Erdene stepped down — I felt something I had not felt before: that power actually belongs to us. Not as an abstract civic principle. As a lived, physical fact. A crowd of ordinary people — most of them young, many of them first-timers — had made something happen.
I am proud of the young people who organized it. Genuinely proud. Not the nostalgic kind of pride that older generations perform when the youth do something impressive. Real pride, because they did it better than we did.
Why People Stay Silent
I have been thinking about why this kind of moment is rare. Why most people — especially working-age people with jobs and kids and mortgages — do not show up.
I think it is one of two things. Either they do not actually know what percentage of their income disappears into taxes and social contributions before they see it. Or they do know — and they have made peace with it. Accepted that this is just how life works. Chosen silence.
Both explanations are troubling. But the first one is fixable. If every young working person in Mongolia understood exactly what was being taken from them — income tax, social security, health contributions stacked on top of each other — I think the square would fill up on its own.
Because the alternative is staying quiet while a small group of connected people and their children extract from the system indefinitely. That group is not going anywhere. It is already reorganizing. New committees, new boards, new positions. The next generation of beneficiaries is already being slotted into place.
I cannot live that way. I am not built for it. I want to build a real business in Mongolia, live well, and feel that the taxes I pay are building something — not feeding someone's kid's lifestyle while mine does without.
What I Want for My Son
I hope my son grows up in a different Mongolia. Not a perfect one. Not a utopia. Just one where the math is fair — where if you work hard, build something, hire people, and pay your taxes, you are not penalized for it. Where a government official's child cannot live in luxury that their parent's salary cannot explain without consequence.
That night in the square felt like a beginning. Not the beginning of the end of some problem — those are never clean. But the beginning of a generation that knows how to demand things. Calmly. Clearly. Without hating the people on the other side.
That is a generation worth believing in.