Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev this week took part in Russia’s most important annual public event: the May 9 celebration of the USSR’s victory over Nazi Germany in 1945.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has turned “Victory Day” into a huge ceremony, where leaders of ex-Soviet countries show up to reaffirm their alliances.
Some of them, including Mirziyoyev, also have a penchant for the political longevity that Putin seems to desire.
After the Russian constitution was amended in 2020 to “nullify” Putin’s previous terms in office, nothing but his own mortality is stopping the seventy-something from presiding over 13 more victory parades.
Mirziyoyev, who has ruled Central Asia’s most populous nation since 2016 and was re-elected in 2021, followed in Putin’s footsteps.
Just hours before flying to Moscow, he announced a snap presidential vote scheduled for July 9.
The elections would follow the April 30 referendum that amended Uzbekistan’s constitution, scrapped Mirziyoyev’s previous terms and extended future terms to seven years.
Such changes have become common in post-Soviet states.
Standing next to Mirziyoyev in the Victory Day parade were Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and Tajik leader Emomali Rahmon, who twice extended their terms through constitutional amendments.
So did Mirziyoyev’s rock-solid predecessor Islam Karimov, who ruled Uzbekistan after independence from 1991 until his death in 2016.
“It is absolutely clear that Mirziyoyev also intends to rule [his] nation for the rest of his life,” Alisher Ilkhamov, Uzbek-born head of Central Asia Due Diligence, a London-based group, told Al Jazeera.
Another Victory Day participant, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, seemed modest by comparison.
Last year, he amended Kazakhstan’s constitution and was re-elected – but only for one term, until 2029.
‘mine, yours, ours’
Before the referendum, Mirziyoyev’s government trained 140,000 activists to educate average Uzbeks about the reform.
Kindergarten preschoolers were filmed shouting the campaign’s main slogan, “The Constitution is mine, yours, ours!”, while a billboard showed a woman whose “life begins after 30” — after April 30 So.
Subway announcements urged passengers “not to lean on doors and instead to lean on the constitution,” while every cell phone user received daily text messages reminding them to vote.
As a result, official turnout reached nearly 85 percent and 90 percent of voters approved the amendments.
“It was clear to the people around me why all this was being done, so they felt deeply indifferent,” Timur Karpov, a human rights activist and owner of an art gallery in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, told Al Jazeera.
But despite the reported violations in Tashkent, he had no doubts about the high turnout.
“Such events always take place with a very high turnout, especially if people are lured by it [free] plov,” a traditional Uzbek dish of rice, carrots and meat distributed at many polling stations, he said.
The “annulment” allows Mirziyoyev to remain in the Aq Saray (White Palace), a presidential residence, for another 14 years, until 2040, when he turns 84.
From reformist to autocrat?
Mirziyoyev’s recent moves contrast with the dawn of his rule.
For 13 years he was Prime Minister of Karimov, kept a low profile and distanced himself from the excesses of his hot-tempered boss.
One of these was the 2005 order to mow down a mob of protesters in the eastern city of Andijan in what became the ex-USSR’s largest and bloodiest crackdown on a popular uprising.
Another was a decades-long practice of forcing Uzbek farmers to grow cotton and sell it to the government at a fixed low price.
Each fall, millions of government employees and high school and college students were herded to cotton fields for weeks as part of one of the world’s largest forced labor systems.
The practice made Uzbekistan a major importer of raw cotton and caused one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in history.
Mirziyoyev dismantled “cotton slavery” by allowing farmers to sell raw fiber at market prices and by promoting the domestic textile industry.
He enacted sweeping and long overdue reforms that reduced and simplified taxes, removed barriers to business and empowered hundreds of thousands of Uzbeks
solve their bureaucratic problems through direct petitions on Mirziyoyev’s website.
He also purged the ranks of prosecutors and security officers, closed a notorious prison where inmates say two dissidents were boiled alive, and released thousands of political prisoners and Muslims imprisoned for alleged “extremism.”
But the reforms were soon broken down.
“Parliamentary development has been suspended, the [presidential] If the government has usurped the functions of the government, the cabinet cannot even manage the issues of potato cultivation on its own,” Tashkent-based political blogger Timur Numanov told Al Jazeera.
For him, the quick vote is an attempt to prevent the rise of charismatic competitors and implement unpopular reforms, such as introducing market prices for natural gas and utilities.
“What will change in two months [before the July 9 vote]? Exactly, nothing – there will be no new party, nor will there be an unexpected alternative candidate,” he said.
Uzbekistan was one of the largest natural gas exporters of the ex-USSR.
But the construction of gas-using chemical plants limited exports and led to severe shortages in the domestic market.
During last winter’s unusually cold, many Uzbeks had to cut down trees and set fires next to their apartment buildings to keep warm and cook food.
In recent years, a construction boom has sent real estate prices skyrocketing, but thousands of Uzbeks have been offered small compensation for their apartments and houses that have been razed to make way for luxury apartments or business centers.
“I have a two-bedroom apartment in front of the five-bedroom house my father built 43 years ago,” a resident of the eastern city of Ferghana told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity. “What reforms are we talking about?”