Mongolia may return to coalition government after official results confirm setback for ruling party

ULAANBAATAR, Mongolia (AP) — Mongolia's ruling party won a much smaller majority in a parliamentary election than it had held previously, according to official results released on Monday, raising the possibility of a return to a coalition government for the first time in eight years.

The Mongolian People's Party took 68 seats in the 126-seat body in Friday's nationwide vote, while the opposition Democratic Party won 42, according to a certified list of winners posted on the General Election Commission website. The remaining 16 seats were divided among smaller parties.

The commission presented the final results to the country's president on Monday shortly before handing out membership cards to the newly elected lawmakers at a ceremony in the State Palace, a grand building in the capital city that houses the parliament chamber and the offices of the president and the prime minister.

The ceremony, held in a palace auditorium, was a time for hearty handshakes and backslapping embraces as lawmakers congratulated each other on their victories. As their names were read out, they went on stage one-by-one to receive a card in a folded, wallet-size protector that certified them as members of parliament.

The People's Party won overwhelmingly in the previous two elections, taking 62 of 76 seats in the previous race in 2020, and ruled the country singlehandedly. A constitutional revision last year added 50 seats to the parliament.

Mongolian media reports said that the ruling party was discussing formulas for a coalition with both the Democratic Party and the HUN party, which won eight seats. Cabinet positions would be divvied up among the coalition members, the reports said. There was no official confirmation of the discussions.

The last coalition government in Mongolia was one led by the Democratic Party from 2012 to 2016. After eight years of one-party rule, this year's election showed a desire among voters to return to a more balanced system.

Ahead of Monday's ceremony, a former Democratic Party lawmaker who started her own party two years ago held a news conference to criticize allegedly unfair campaign tactics by the People's Party.

Oyungerel Tsedevdamba, the founder and leader of the Civic Unity Party, accused the People's Party of using state power and access to a government database and employees to give itself an unfair advantage in the race.

“The Civic Unity Party cannot and will not congratulate the Mongolian People’s Party for its victory,” she said. "It’s not real victory. ... It’s a result of intimidation and repression.”

She spoke with five other candidates from her party, which did not win any seats in the election.

Mongolia transitioned to democracy in the early 1990s after more than six decades as a one-party communist state. The vast and sparsely populated landlocked country sits between China and Russia.

Ruling Mongolian People's Party lawmaker Damdinnyam Gongor is congratulated as he attends a ceremony to handout Parliamentary membership card to newly elected lawmakers at the Mongolian Government Palace in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, Monday, July 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

Newly elected opposition Democratic Party lawmaker J. Bayasgalan holds up his Parliamentary membership cards during a ceremony at the Mongolian Government Palace in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, Monday, July 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

Journalists watch as newly elected lawmakers walk on stage to receive their parliamentary membership cards at the Mongolian Government Palace in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, Monday, July 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

Ruling Mongolian People's Party lawmaker Damdinnyam Gongor is congratulated on stage upon receiving his Parliamentary membership card handed out to newly elected lawmakers at the Mongolian Government Palace in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, Monday, July 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

Attendees stand for the anthem during a ceremony to handout Parliamentary membership cards to newly elected lawmakers at the Mongolian Government Palace in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, Monday, July 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

NEW YORK (AP) — In the winter of 1789, around the time George Washington was elected the country's first president, a Boston-based printer quietly launched another American institution.

William Hill Brown's “The Power of Sympathy,” published anonymously by Isaiah Thomas & Company, is widely cited as something momentous: the first American novel.

Around 100 pages long, Brown's narrative tells of two young New Englanders whose love affair abruptly and tragically ends when they learn a shocking secret that makes their relationship unbearable. The dedication page, addressed to the “Young Ladies of United Columbia” (the United States), promised an exposé of “the Fatal consequences of Seduction” and a prescription for the "Economy of Human Life."

Outside of Boston society, though, few would have known or cared whether “The Power of Sympathy” marked any kind of literary milestone.

“If you picked 10 random citizens, I doubt it would have mattered to any of them,” says David Lawrimore, an associate professor of English at the University of Idaho who has written often about early U.S. literature. “Most people weren't thinking about the first American novel.”

Subtitled “The Triumph of Nature. Founded in Truth,” Brown's book is in many ways characteristic of the era, whether its epistolary format, its Anglicized prose, its unidentified author, or its pious message. But “The Power of Sympathy” also includes themes that reflected the aspirations and anxieties of a young country and still resonate now.

Dana McClain, an assistant professor of English at Holy Family University, notes that Brown was an outspoken Federalist, believing in a strong national government, and shared his contemporaries' preoccupation with forging a stable republican citizenry. The letters in “The Power of Sympathy” include reflections on class, temperament and the differences between North and South, notably the “aristocratic temper” of Southern slave holders that endangered “domestic quietude," as if anticipating the next century's Civil War.

Like many other early American writers, fiction and nonfiction, Brown tied the behavior of women to the fate of the larger society. The novel's correspondents fret about the destabilizing “power of pleasure” and how female envy “inundates the land with a flood of scandal.” Virtue is likened to a “mighty river” that "fertilizes the country through which it passes and increases in magnitude and force until it empty itself into the ocean.”

Brown also examines at length the ways novels might be a path to corruption or a vehicle to uplift, mirroring current debates over the banning and restrictions of books in schools and libraries.

“Most of the novels with which our female libraries are overrun are built upon on a foundation not always placed on strict morality, and in the pursuit of of objects not always probable or praiseworthy,” one of Brown's characters warns. “Novels, not regulated on the chaste principles of true friendship, rational love, and connubial duty, appear to me totally unfit to form the minds of women, of friends, or of wives.”

Brown was likely more interested in shaping minds than in literary glory. “The Great American Novel” is a favorite catchphrase but wasn't coined until the 1860s. During Brown's lifetime, novels were a relatively crude art form and were valued mostly for satire, light entertainment or moral instruction. Few writers identified themselves as “novelists”: Brown was known as a poet, and essayist and the composer of an opera.

Even he recognized the book’s lower stature, writing in the novel's preface: “This species of writing hath not been received with universal approbation."

“The Power of Sympathy” was commonly cited as the first American novel in the 1800s, but few bothered debating it until the 20th century. Scholars then agreed that honors should belong to the first written and published in the United States by an author born and still residing in the country.

Those guidelines disqualified such earlier works as Charlotte Ramsay Lennox's “The Life of Harriot Stuart” and Thomas Atwood Digges' “Adventures of Alonso.” Another contender was "Father Bombo's Pilgrimage to Mecca,” a prose adventure by college students Hugh Henry Brackenridge and Philip Freneau, both of whom went on to prominent public careers. Written around 1770, the manuscript was later believed lost and wasn't published in full until 1975.

Brown's novel was unexamined for so long that only in the late 19th century did the public even discover he had written it. Many had credited the Boston poet Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton, whose family had endured a scandal similar to the one in “The Power of Sympathy.”

In 1894-95, editor Arthur W. Brayley of the Bostonian serialized the novel in his magazine, identifying Morton as the author. But after being contacted by Brown's niece, Rebecca Vollentine Thompson, Brayley published a lengthy correction, titled “The Real Author of the ‘Power of Sympathy.’”

Thompson herself added a preface to a 1900 reissue, noting that Brown was close to Morton's family and alleging that the publication had been “suppressed” because Brown had bared an “unfortunate scandal.”

A clock maker's son, Brown was a Boston native, likely born in 1765. He was well-read, connected, culturally conservative and politically minded; one of his first published writings was an unflattering poem about Daniel Shays, the namesake for the 1786-87 rebellion of impoverished Revolutionary War veterans in Massachusetts. Brown is also the author of several posthumous releases, including the play “The Treason of Arnold” and the novel “Ira and Isabella.”

His unofficial standing as “America's First Novelist” did not lead to broader fame. The novel, currently in print through a 1996 edition from Penguin Classics, remains more of interest to specialists and antiquarians than to general readers.

Brown was not yet 30 when he died in North Carolina, in 1793, from what is believed to be malaria. He apparently never married or had children. No memorials or other historical sites are dedicated to him. No literary societies have been formed in his name.

His burial site is unknown.

This image released by Penguin Classics shows the title page of the first edition of the 1789 book "The Power of Sympathy" by William Hill Brown. (Penguin Classics via AP)