Uzbekistan. Saida Mirziyoyeva – the president's daughter – may take power

39-year-old Saida Mirziyoyeva, the eldest daughter of the ruling Shavkat Mirziyoyev Uzbekistan since 2016, she has officially served as an advisor to the president, but is widely considered the second most important person in his administration. A few days ago, she was also appointed plenipotentiary for the development of Karakalpakstan, an autonomous republic in the west of the country.

Her career is developing at a rapid pace, experts emphasize.

For many years, Shavkat Mirziyoyev remained in the shadow of his predecessor, the first president of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, and very slowly climbed the successive levels of the power structure. Saida, who appeared on the political scene when her father took office as head of state, no longer has this problem.

Before 2016, the public in Uzbekistan knew absolutely nothing about the new president's family. Mirziyoyev first appeared in public with his family only on election day. Saida, who was then 32, kept in the shadows for the next three and a half years. There is no information about her life until she turned 35, writes the Radio Svoboda portal.

– Saida is like a meteorite. A person no one knew became the second person in Uzbekistan, as if she fell from the sky – journalist Jahongir Muhammad told the radio station.

Other analysts believe that the president's entrusting his daughter with control over the huge region of nearly two million people in Karakalpakstan (with an area of ​​166,000 square kilometres, or more than half of Poland – ed.) may be a prelude to preparing her for the role of her father's successor.

Alisher Taksanov, a former Uzbek diplomat living in Switzerlandbelieves that the scenario of power passing from father to daughter in Uzbekistan is realistic. – Uzbekistan is not a democratic state, but a specific version of eastern despotism, where the state is ruled not by a specific person or team, but by a family – he told Radio Svoboda.

– Virtually all of Mirziyoyev's relatives are in the power structures – either in local administration or in ministries and agencies. Part of the property and part of the financial assets that belonged to Gulnara Karimova (daughter of Islam Karimov, who is serving a sentence for embezzlement)quietly became the property of the Mirziyoyev family. This means that they are wealthy people who manage everything necessary to exercise power – believes Alisher Taksanov.

According to the former diplomat, Mirziyoyev will probably try to implement the Turkmen variant, in which power is transferred through inheritance, or the North Korean variant, where people will accept everything and vote as always.

– Saida Mirziyoyeva feels good in the public sphere, and her work increasingly resembles an internship before a career leap. She recently met with the president Kazakhstanand its ties with the Kremlin seem to be getting closer, said Nadezhda Ataeva, head of the Paris-based Association for Human Rights in Central Asia.

In her opinion, the more actively Uzbekistan integrates in the international arena, the more interest it arouses in the Kremlin. The prerogatives (of Mirziyoyev's daughter) go beyond the prerogatives of her predecessors and other officials in the presidential apparatus.

– Putin once rolled out a carpet in the same way for the son of the President of Turkmenistan, Berdymukhammedov (there, power passed from father to son – ed.), Atayeva added.

However, according to Alisher Ilhamov, head of the London-based research center Central Asia Due Diligence, the president's eldest daughter is not the only candidate from his family to take power.

As this analyst stated, it should be remembered that the State Security Service, whose deputy head is Batyr Tursunov, Saida's father-in-law, has great importance, power and a strong position in the country. Otabek Umarov, the husband of the president's younger daughter, deputy head of another structure – the Presidential Security Service, who accompanies Mirziyoyev on his travels and, according to unofficial reports, has considerable influence on him, may also have a desire to take power.

In the Central Asian countries, there are many precedents when children of presidents received prestigious positions in the government, Radio Svoboda recalled. In Kazakhstan, the eldest daughter of the former leader Nursultan Nazarbayev, Dariga, was, among other things, the speaker of the Senate, which put her in second place in the queue for the presidency. Like many members of the Nazarbayev family, she left politics only after bloody riots in January 2022 that broke out during anti-government protests. In turn, the president's daughter TajikistanEmomali Rahmon, Ozoda, is the head of his administration, and his son Rustam Emomali is expected to succeed the 70-year-old authoritarian leader, as evidenced by Rustam's rapid rise to the top and nomination as speaker of the upper house of parliament. The president's son combines this office with the position of mayor of Dushanbe.