Out of the urn in Astana on Wednesday afternoon came 121 ballots. None was spoiled. Of the 121, 120 said Yerlan Koshanov, and one said nothing. That is the whole record of the first vote of the Qazaqstan Halyq Kenesi, a council of 126 people the president named by decree the day before, opened by the head of its secretariat, who is also its deputy chairman, and asked to choose a chairman the president had proposed at the session’s opening. By the agency’s clock, 51 minutes after the nomination was reported, it had. The ballot was secret, so the abstainer will remain a number, and a single blank sheet in a room of 121 is the loneliest form of speech a constitution allows.
The morning of the same day had been the Kurultai’s. Its new parliament of 145 gave its consent to 10 judges of the Constitutional Court, presented by the head of the presidential administration, by “a majority of the total number of deputies”, and published no number. Then 8 members of the audit chamber, then 6 of the election commission. Consent is the constitutional word. The count is the constitutional silence.
More than 2,000 kilometres east, in a different building with a different problem, 15 people took the third reading of a 34 trillion tugrik budget. The State Great Khural’s committee on security and foreign policy has 29 members; 15 came, which is 51.7%, and the vote passed to the budget committee. In the afternoon 29 of 56 sat in a joint session and approved a $450 million loan from the Asian Development Bank and a 158 billion yen loan from Japan, by 56.3% and 66.7% of those present. Every number on the Mongolian side of Wednesday is a fraction of a room.
The room itself has been the news for a week. The plenary needs 64 of 126 members to exist; on Thursday 52 came, on Monday 58, and the house did not exist on either day. On Tuesday 75 came, the chamber heard a new justice minister, took no vote because its rules say a presented minister is deemed presented, and went home without reaching the budget. The prime minister has 68 members of his own party on paper and, by his former Speaker’s count, 30 of them are somebody else’s. He told the opposition on Tuesday to collect the signatures and bring him the letter for his resignation. They have 42 votes. The letter needs the 30.
Absence is the veto the Khural has rediscovered. Nobody in Ulaanbaatar has voted against the budget’s third reading, the fiscal rule’s amendment, the 2027 draft or the pension rise dated 1 November. Nobody needs to. A quorum is a majority that has to be physically assembled, and 63 members who stay in their offices on the right afternoon defeat the 63 who come. It is the cheapest instrument in parliamentary life, because it leaves no roll call: no name is recorded against a pension rise, and the pension rise is not passed.
This column noted 10 days ago that Kyrgyzstan’s Jogorku Kenesh would call the presidential election on 24 September. It did, on Thursday morning, by 86 votes to none. The law fixes the regular election on the fourth Wednesday of January of the year the president’s term expires; the parliament’s part is to confirm the arithmetic, and the Speaker explained that a Wednesday is chosen to lift turnout and to make vote-buying harder. No candidate is named in the resolution. The president took his oath on 28 January 2021, and the date his deputies have confirmed is 27 January 2027, one day short of 6 years. On a Wednesday the deputies were unanimous.
Absence is the veto the Khural has rediscovered.
So the week gave the region 3 ways of counting. In Astana the count was published and meant nothing, because a body appointed by one signature was asked whether it approved of that signature’s next choice. Ulaanbaatar’s count was everything and was never taken, because the fight is over who walks through the door. In Bishkek the count was unanimous and the object of it was a calendar. In none of the 3 chambers did a vote decide a thing that was open.
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which sat between the empires of its day for 2 centuries, ran its Sejm on the principle that a single deputy’s “I do not allow” dissolved the session and annulled its work. The first time it happened, in 1652, a deputy called Siciński broke the parliament by himself and went home. Over the next century the veto was used so freely that the Sejm passed almost nothing, the neighbouring empires learned that one deputy was cheaper to pay than a majority, and the state that could not decide was decided for, in 1772, 1793 and 1795. The Constitution of 3 May 1791 abolished the veto. It came 4 years before the third partition.
Mongolia has rediscovered the veto in its passive form, and it has done so at the one moment when its 2 neighbours have a joint interest in the country being quiet, whole and traversable: the cabinet’s Wednesday agenda carried, along with the coal plant and the investment plan, a progress report on the gas pipeline from one neighbour to the other across Mongolian ground. Nobody is partitioning Mongolia. Nobody needs to. A country whose parliament cannot assemble to pay its pensioners is not a country whose parliament will be consulted about a pipeline.
Kazakhstan has abolished the veto so completely that the abstainer in Astana is the constitution’s last private citizen. Kyrgyzstan has written the decision into the calendar and asked its parliament to read it aloud, which it did, in unison, and its prime minister spent the week in Hangzhou hearing where the railway will go. The Commonwealth’s error was a parliament that could stop everything. The region’s parliaments have arrived at the opposite condition by 3 different roads, and the road that runs through Ulaanbaatar is the only one still under construction.