Uzbekistan votes to elect second ever president

Uzbekistan went to the polls yesterday to elect a successor to the late strongman Islam Karimov with long-serving prime minister Shavkat Mirziyoyev expected to score a comfortable victory in the ex-Soviet state.

According to the Central Electoral Commission some 33.73 percent of the 20 million plus electorate cast votes in the first five hours of the vote -- exceeding the minimum turnout of a third of voters required to make the polls valid.

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Voting at over 9,300 polling stations throughout the Muslim-majority Central Asian country with no tradition of competitive elections began at 0100 GMT and was due to close at 1500 GMT.

Mirziyoyev, who was appointed prime minister in 2003, became interim president following Karimov's death aged 78 in September from a stroke.

He cast his vote in the capital Tashkent before 0600 GMT according to state media.

Representing the same Liberal-Democratic Party that Karimov stood for in the last presidential vote in 2015, he is facing three other challengers in a bid to secure a five-year term.

But analysts noted that the other candidates are not critical of Mirziyoyev or the regime in the country bordering Afghanistan where Beijing, Moscow, and Washington all vie for influence.

"The format for Uzbek elections has not changed since Karimov's death because the regime has not had time to think of anything different," said Kamoliddin Rabbimov, an Uzbek political analyst who lives in France.

"If anything, efforts have been made to ensure other candidates are even more obscure because Mirziyoyev's stature among the population is not yet what Karimov's was," he told AFP.

"Uzbekistan has its own specific take on democracy. There will be no surprises here, unlike in America with Trump," he added.

Karimov's 27-year reign began in 1989 at the tail-end of the Soviet era, and was often criticised for extreme abuses of human rights.