Citizens of the Central Asian nation of Uzbekistan are going to the polls on July 9 in a presidential election that is certain to keep long-standing leader Shavkat Mirziyoev in office, with three token opponents mostly silent leading up to the vote.
Mirziyoev -- first elected in 2016 -- will be looking to secure another term in office following constitutional changes that will allow the 65-year-old autocrat to serve two more terms of seven years each.
Some 20 million people are eligible to vote in the landlocked country of 35 million people, which is rich in natural gas and strategically placed in a volatile region, bordering Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan.
Polls open at 8 a.m. and close at 8 p.m.
The Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE) said that, following an invitation from Uzbek authorities, it will send an observation team to the elections and hold a news conference in the capital, Tashkent, on July 10.
Mirziyoev won plaudits early in his presidency, ushering in some reforms and sparking optimism for potential change. But he has since lapsed back into what many analysts say is a more familiar and repressive administration along the lines of predecessor Islam Karimov, the hard-line ruler under whom Mirziyoev served as prime minister for 13 years until Karimov’s death in 2016.
Mirziyoev is credited with eradicating forced labor in the cotton fields, opening the country to tourism and investment, and allowing limited media freedoms.
But critics have pointed, among other things, to a crackdown on minority unrest in the nominally autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan in July 2022 as part of steps that have undermined the strongman’s claim to national unity and reform.
His official opponents -- a former education minister, a former high-ranking forestry official, a career judge fresh from a term in the slavishly loyal Uzbek Senate -- have remained mostly silent since the campaign kicked off in May.
One potential legitimate opponent, however, has been thwarted in his attempts to take part in the election. Xidirnazar Allaqulov, a former university rector-turned regime opponent, said his bid to establish a political party has repeatedly and sometimes violently been disrupted by authorities.
“For 32 years of independence there has been no competition in our political arena,” Allaqulov, 67, told RFE/RL in a phone interview. “They don’t want it. They don’t want justice. They don’t want the rule of law.”
