Uzbeks vote under pro-reform leader

TASHKENT: Uzbekistan voted on Sunday in the first parliamentary election since a new leader ushered in an era of reform after years of isolation and authoritarian rule.

President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who took charge of Central Asia’s most populous state in 2016 after the death of hardline predecessor and former patron Islam Karimov, described the vote as "historic".

Mirziyoyev has been lauded for doing away with many of Karimov’s authoritarian excesses, releasing some political prisoners, battling forced labour and opening up the landlocked state to tourism and foreign investment.

But choices on the ballot in the former Soviet republic were few -- all five parties competing are represented in the outgoing parliament.

Muslim-majority but staunchly secular Uzbekistan is home to 33 million people, over 20 million of whom can vote.

Polling stations closed at 8 pm (1500 GMT), with the Central Election Commission (CEC) expected to announce results Monday.

Britain’s influential magazine The Economist this week named Uzbekistan as its country of the year, saying "no other country travelled so far" in 2019.

Yet the reform drive has so far not allowed real competition to Mirziyoyev, 62, to develop.

The president cast his vote in the capital Tashkent where he arrived with his family, including daughter Saida Mirziyoyeva who holds a top government communications post.

Mirziyoyev called the election "historic" and credited parties for competing with each other in the pre-election period.

"We are making history now and people understand that well," he told journalists. "Society has changed, its relationship to parties has changed."

The 150-member lower house, where no party has ever achieved a commanding majority, has a reputation for merely rubber-stamping government legislation.

The Liberal Democratic Party is the currently largest with 52 seats, followed by Milli Tiklanish, known in English as the National Revival Democratic Party, with 36.