page_title: Shavkat Mirziyoyev
section_title: Presidency
hierarchical_section_title: Shavkat Mirziyoyev / Presidency
caption_attribution_description: English: Uzbek President Shavkat MIrziyoyev shaking hands with Nursultan Nazarbayev in Astana.
context_page_description: Shavkat Miromonovich Mirziyoyev is an Uzbek politician who has served as President of Uzbekistan and Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Uzbekistan since 2016. Previously he was the Prime Minister of Uzbekistan from 2003 to 2016.
  Following the death of President Islam Karimov, he was appointed by the Supreme Assembly as interim president of Uzbekistan on 8 September 2016. He was subsequently elected as president in the December 2016 presidential election, winning 88.6% of the vote, and was sworn in on 14 December 2016.
context_section_description: A member of the Samarkand clan, he was considered to be one of the leading potential successors to Islam Karimov as President of Uzbekistan. Mirziyoyev was reported to have friendly relations with Karimov's wife, Tatyana Karimova, and National Security Council chairman Rustam Inoyatov.
  After the death of Karimov was announced on 2 September 2016, Mirziyoyev was appointed as head of the committee organizing the funeral of the President. That was taken as a sign that Mirziyoyev would succeed Karimov as president. On 8 September 2016, he was appointed as interim president of Uzbekistan by a joint session of both houses of parliament. Although the chairman of the Senate, Nigmatilla Yuldashev, was constitutionally designated as Karimov's successor, Yuldashev proposed that Mirziyoyev take the post of interim president instead in light of Mirziyoyev's "many years of experience". There were expectations that Mirziyoyev would repair Uzbek relations with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. He started to settle a long-running border dispute with Kyrgyzstan, and regular flights between the capitals of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan were set to resume in January 2017 for the first time since 1992.
  The electoral commission announced on 16 September that Mirziyoyev would stand in the December 2016 presidential election as the candidate of the Liberal Democratic Party.
  Mirziyoyev won the election, held on 4 December 2016, with 88.6% of the vote according to official results, defeating three minor candidates. The election was described by The Economist as a sham; the paper wrote that Mirziyoyev's bent was as authoritarian as that of Karimov and that state media claimed the choice was between Mirziyoyev, chaos, or Islamic radicalism. It also claimed that the three opponents were only on the ballot to keep up the appearance of pluralism. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe said the election lacked "a genuine choice," pointing to instances of ballot box stuffing and proxy voting.
  On 12 December 2016, Deputy Prime Minister Abdulla Aripov was nominated to take over from Mirziyoyev as prime minister. Mirziyoyev was sworn in as president on 14 December, vowing to "continue the work of my dear teacher, the great statesman Islam Karimov", while also promising "many changes in the cabinet". Aripov was confirmed as prime minister by parliament on the same day; a cabinet reshuffle followed on 15 December. On 6 March 2017, he made a state visit to Turkmenistan; it was his first foreign trip after the election.
  In the three months following the death of Islam Karimov, Mirziyoyev began to hint at reforms to longstanding policies that had held back the Uzbek economy and isolated the country internationally, so many analysts believed that Mirziyoyev would be a better president than his predecessor.
  However, the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development noted that "The people of Uzbekistan play no part in political decision-making processes. So far, no parliamentary or presidential election held in the post-Soviet era has been considered as either free or fair by the international community... Given the sensitive political situation in Uzbekistan, development cooperation activities there are implemented as far away from government circles as possible." However, the positive results of his rule are visible. Uzbekistan created more than 336,000 new jobs in 2017. The volume of exports increased by almost 15 percent. In 2018, the total financial indicator of exports is expected at 12.1 billion US dollars. He initiated the project of "Tashkent City", intended to attract foreign investors to Uzbekistan. Mirziyoyev promised to resume negotiations with the World Trade Organization (WTO) on joining the organization in 2018. On several occasions, he sharply criticized the administration and officials in the presence of media.
  
  On 22 December, the first time in the country's history, Shavkat Mirziyoyev made an appeal to the parliament. His speech lasted for four hours. He said:
  Some people tell me that I did not know about everything in countr
caption: Mirziyoyev with Nursultan Nazarbayev at the 2018 SCO summit in China