Tashkent

Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev was re-elected on Sunday with 87.1 per cent of the vote, according to preliminary results released Monday by the country’s Central Election Commission, Al Jazeera reported. With more than 15 million voters participating in Sunday’s vote, Mirziyoyev won a majority.

Notably, the Uzbek president, who has been in power since 2016, called early elections after a vote to change the constitution, reset the number of terms and extend the presidential term from five to seven years. Shavkat Mirziyoyev was already predicted to win the most votes, despite competing against three relatively unknown candidates from the Ecological Party, the People’s Democratic Party and the Adolait Social Democratic Party, Al Jazeera reported.

Since taking power, Mirziyoyev, who had previously served as prime minister under his predecessor Islam Karimov, established himself as a reformer. According to Al Jazeera, he implemented long-awaited reforms that simplified taxes, removed barriers for businesses and allowed many people to resolve their bureaucratic issues by filing petitions on the president’s website.

The economy and education are the main issues of Mirziyoyev’s re-election campaign. He has said that his immediate goal is to double the country’s GDP to 160 billion US dollars. Like other countries in Central Asia, Uzbekistan is trying to limit the negative effects of Western sanctions against its long-time trading partner Russia due to the conflict in Ukraine.