Uzbekistan gussies Potemkin democracy ahead of vote

The pocket parties in parliament will get more money, while any real opposition will be suppressed and kept at a distance. In matters of politics, President Mirziyoyev is reform-averse.

Central Asia does a good line in futile elections.

But few polls could be less consequential than those to elect the members of Uzbekistan’s toothless, catspaw parliament.

That notwithstanding, the authorities are undertaking efforts to gussy this Potemkin chamber ahead of a vote later this year. 

Earlier this month, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev signed a change to legislation to increase the amount on funding the country’s five legally registered parties receive from the state. 

Under the Uzbek system, 40 percent of state funds earmarked for parties are distributed equally among the parties, while the remainder is doled out in accordance with the proportion of seats a party holds in parliament. 

In absolute cash terms, this favours the likes of the ruling Uzbekistan Liberal Democratic Party (UzLiDeP). But it does also provide a relatively disproportionate amount of support for forces at the other end of the size spectrum, namely the Ecological Party of Uzbekistan, which holds only 15 seats in the 150-member lower chamber of the Oliy Majlis, as the legislature is known. 

Doing attentive arithmetic does this democratically hollow system far too many favours, however.

UzLiDeP dominates because it is the party most associated with the president. It registered Mirziyoyev as its presidential candidate for the drab snap elections of 2023, which culminated in him winning almost 88 percent of the vote. It performed the same service for the late President Islam Karimov, who died in 2016.

In a genuine democracy, psephologists scrutinise electoral swings and attempt to divine what this implies about public sentiment. Uzbekistan does not do much swinging, though.

UzLiDeP increased its seat count by one in the most recent two-round polls, in 2019-20. 

The runner-up, the Milliy Tiklanish (National Revival) party, returned exactly the same number of MPs as it did in the elections before: 36. Another pair of almost indistinguishable also-rans, Adolat and the People’s Democratic Party of Uzbekistan, added and lost a small number of MPs, respectively.

Each party is engineered to cater to an assumed demographic. UzLiDeP’s brand is nominally youthful, aspirational, reformist, and enterprise-centred. Milliy Tiklanish is for more conservative types — the sort who might in the West be inclined to get themselves into a lather over culture war issues. The People’s Democratic Party is positioned as the champion of the poor man and woman; its slight downturn in fortunes in the last election was a subtle but calculated signal to the public that the size of this cohort is shrinking as a result of Mirziyoyev’s sage leadership.

Political party apparatchiks bristle at the idea that they should criticise the conduct of the government, or even one another, and instead favour a model of consensus. 

For good measure, the recent changes to political party legislation include a provision banning the creation and operation of foreign political parties within Uzbekistan.

As there was no public debate or information campaign around this (or any other) specific feature of the legislation, it is not immediately obvious what exact anxiety this is meant to be addressing beyond generalised concerns about the doings of nebulous and ill-intentioned foreign-based actors.

One strong likelihood is that the goal here is to constrain the scope for action among diaspora groups — most notably, the large Karakalpak community living in neighbouring Kazakhstan. Any prospect of Karakalpaks mobilising politically around ethnic and autonomy issues has thus been made only more remote. It has been a key priority for the Mirziyoyev regime to definitively kill off the Karakalpak autonomy question ever since the bloody unrest of July 2022.

The exiled opposition may also be in mind. 

Mirziyoyev purports to welcome the idea of an opposition — so long as it has Uzbek roots. At least he said so when pressed on the matter in 2019.

“As president, I am not against the opposition,” he said. “But we need to create the conditions for it to materialise here, [for it to be an opposition] that understands the problems of the people, for them to have experienced the same things as the people, who have drunk water and eaten bread here.”

This is wildly disingenuous. Veteran opposition figures such as Muhammad Salih, who has lived in exile since the 1990s, would doubtless be carted away by security service agents upon arrival were they ever to return. When Salih announced that he would try to run in the 2019 parliamentary elections, the initiative never went anywhere. 

As for creating propitious conditions for a locally cultivated opposition, spare a thought for former university lecturer Khidirnazar Allakulov, who created Hakikat va Tarakkiyot (Truth and Progress) party and tried to get it registered, only to receive threats and harassment for his troubles. 

When the unregistered Erk (Freedom) party tried to field the singer Jahongir Otajonov as its candidate in the 2021 presidential elections, he was likewise threatened and attacked by government-sympathising heavies. Otajonov quickly bowed out. 

Amid all this, Mirziyoyev merrily gaslights away. At his inauguration speech following his win in the July 2023 snap election, he vowed that under his rule, the right to “constructive opposition” would be upheld.

“We guarantee the activities of the constructive opposition — I repeat, the constructive opposition — freedom of speech and the press, and the rights of citizens to receive, use and disseminate information,” he said.

Only the most deluded observer would say any of those things are currently guaranteed in Uzbekistan.

What Mirziyoyev calls the constructive opposite will be on full display in the parliamentary elections expected to take place in October.

Barring any surprise developments, the same five parties will run again on “don’t rock the boat” platforms, they will meekly accept their allotted share of seats, and then they will settle in for another five-year slumber.