TASHKENT: Uzbeks voted massively in a presidential election on Sunday with turnout topping 70 per cent halfway through the poll expected to deliver another landslide victory for strongman Islam Karimov.

Few doubted the outcome after all three of Karimov’s challengers endorsed his campaign to extend an iron-fisted rule that dates to before the fall of the Soviet Union.

The central electoral commission said almost 15 million people had cast their ballots at more than 9,000 polling stations as of the halfway point in voting, for a turnout of 71.6pc.

Karimov, 77, cast his ballot at midday in the lopsided vote in the Central Asian country of more than 30 million, where voting began at 6am as snow fell in the streets of the capital Tashkent. Karimov, who won around 90pc of the vote in 2007, is running for a five-year term following two seven-year stints.

Before those, the man who held onto his leadership position when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 extended his post-Soviet rule by referendum in 1996.

While exit polls are prohibited under Uzbek law, many voters in Tashkent said they had voted for Karimov.

Burkhon, a 63-year municipal transport mechanic who declined to give his surname, cited periodic unrest in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, as well as the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, as reasons for casting his vote for the longtime strongman.

“We haven’t had such bad things, thanks to Karimov, and we don’t want them happening in the future,” Burkhon said.

Published in Dawn, March 30th, 2015

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