Ulan Bator - Mongolian voters were expected to re-elect the hardline Soviet-trained president, Mr Natsagiin Bagabandi, to a second term yesterday, cementing the grip on power of former communists after their landslide victory in parliamentary polls last year. The election is widely seen as a referendum of the new government's more cautious approach to reform in the impoverished Asian nation.
Mr Natsagiin is the former chief of the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, which last year won 72 of 76 seats in the Great Hural, or parliament, and cleaned up local elections amid widespread frustration with a decade of capitalist-style economic reforms.