Shavkat Mirziyoyev

Presidency

Mirziyoyev with Nursultan Nazarbayev.

Mirziyoyev with Vladimir Putin.

Mirziyoyev at the 2018 SCO summit in China

Mirziyoyev with members of the Uzbek diaspora in the United States.

A member of the Samarkand clan, he was considered to be one of the leading potential successors to Islam Karimov as President of Uzbekistan. Mirziyoyev was reported to have friendly relations with Karimov's wife, Tatyana Karimova, and National Security Council chairman Rustam Inoyatov.^[9]

After the death of Karimov was announced on 2 September 2016, Mirziyoyev was appointed as head of the committee organizing the funeral of the President.^[10] That was taken as a sign that Mirziyoyev would succeed Karimov as President.^[6] On 8 September 2016, he was appointed as Interim President of Uzbekistan by a joint session of both houses of parliament. Although the Chairman of the Senate, Nigmatilla Yuldashev, was constitutionally designated as Karimov's successor, Yuldashev proposed that Mirziyoyev take the post of Interim President instead in light of Mirziyoyev's "many years of experience".^[11] There were expectations that Mirziyoyev would repair Uzbek relations with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. He started to settle a long-running border dispute with Kyrgyzstan, and regular flights between the capitals of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan were set to resume in January 2017 for the first time since 1992.^[12][13]

The electoral commission announced on 16 September that Mirziyoyev would stand in the December 2016 presidential election as the candidate of the Liberal Democratic Party.^[14]

Mirziyoyev won the election, held on 4 December 2016, with 88.6% of the vote according to official results, defeating three minor candidates. The election was described by the Economist as a sham; the paper wrote that Mirziyoyev's bent was as authoritarian as that of Karimov and that state media claimed the choice was between Mirziyoyev, chaos, or Islamic radicalism. It also claimed that the three opponents were only on the ballot to keep up the appearance of pluralism. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe said the election lacked "a genuine choice," pointing to instances of ballot box stuffing and proxy voting.^[15]

On 12 December 2016, Deputy Prime Minister Abdulla Aripov was nominated to take over from Mirziyoyev as Prime Minister.^[16] Mirziyoyev was sworn in as President on 14 December, vowing to "continue the work of my dear teacher, the great statesman Islam Karimov", while also promising "many changes in the cabinet". Aripov was confirmed as Prime Minister by parliament on the same day;^[17] a cabinet reshuffle followed on 15 December.^[18] On 6 March 2017, he made a state visit to Turkmenistan; it was his first foreign trip after the election.^[19]

In the three months following the death of Islam Karimov, Mirziyoyev began to hint at reforms to longstanding policies that had held back the Uzbek economy and isolated the country internationally, so many analysts believed that Mirziyoyev would be a better president than his predecessor.^[20][21]

However, the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development noted that "The people of Uzbekistan play no part in political decision-making processes. So far, no parliamentary or presidential election held in the post-Soviet era has been considered as either free or fair by the international community... Given the sensitive political situation in Uzbekistan, development cooperation activities there are implemented as far away from government circles as possible."^[22] However, the positive results of his rule are visible. Uzbekistan created more than 336,000 new jobs in 2017.^[23] The volume of exports increased by almost 15 percent. In 2018, the total financial indicator of exports is expected at 12.1 billion US dollars.^[24] He initiated the project of "Tashkent City", intended to attract foreign investors to Uzbekistan. Mirziyoyev promised to resume negotiations with the World Trade Organization (WTO) on joining the organization in 2018. On several occasions, he sharply criticized the administration and officials in the presence of media.^[25]

On 22 December, the first time in the country's history, Shavkat Mirziyoyev made an appeal to the parliament. His speech lasted for 4 hours.^[26] Among other, he said:

Some people tell me that I did not know about everything in country when I was a prime minister? I knew everything, but the environment was bad. Now I am talking about it openly, even if some people do not like it. Several years the so-called ‘rats’, ‘the children of some people’ did much to spoil the country's investment fund. Corruption is implicated in many investment projects, and in some projects, it is 50%. Corruption was also in transport policy, both internal and external.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meets with the President of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev, at the Department of State in Washington, D.C., on 17 May 2018

Some analysts think Mirziyoyev wants to enter in history as a reformer. He removed most of Karimov's officials and urged government to employ "new, young people who love their country." After a year of in office, Mirziyoyev is increasingly moving away from his predecessor's policy, which is especially visibly in his active foreign policy. He visited all the Uzbek regions and big cities to get acquainted with the implementation of the projects and reforms which he ordered. Many analysts and Western media compared his rule with Chinese Deng Xiaoping or Russian Mikhail Gorbachev his rule has been quoted as being an "Uzbek Spring".^[27][28]

In May 2018, Mirziyoyev was nominated as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize by Olimzhon Tukhtanazarov, who is a representative of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.^[29]