It’s been ten years since Uzbekistan’s first president, Islam Karimov, died after ruling the country with an iron fist for a quarter century. In the decade since he took over, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has launched some ambitious reforms. The security services’ grip on the country has loosened, and Uzbekistan has started opening up to the rest of the world and becoming more prosperous. Yet with time, it has become clear that Mirziyoyev was not so much building a new Uzbekistan as simply modernizing Karimov’s system.

Ten years later, everything still revolves around and is decided by the head of the country. Access to wealth depends on a person’s proximity to the president and his family, and the promised reforms end as soon as they start to threaten the privilege of the ruling regime.

Outwardly, today’s Uzbekistan bears little resemblance to the isolated dictatorship presided over by Karimov. Tashkent’s renovated and expanded airport is in stark contrast to the old one, where any arrival or departure entailed hours of standing in line to be interrogated by security service officials. Uzbek nationals had to produce an exit visa, and women under thirty-five needed both of their parents’ written permission to leave the country. Now document checks generally take less than five minutes. 

The banking system has improved and nearly everywhere accepts cards now. People no longer need to seek out black-market currency exchanges in order to change their money at market rates.

Under Mirziyoyev, the economy has grown an average of 5–6 percent a year, reaching a record 7.7 percent last year. The poverty level fell from 17 percent in 2021 to 5.8 percent in 2025. Unemployment dropped from its peak of 10.5 percent during the pandemic to 4.8 percent in 2025. Crucially, all of these data are now calculated according to international standards.

In 2024 alone, foreign direct investment into Uzbekistan totaled $11.9 billion. The structure of exports has started to shift away from raw materials—such as cotton—to processed products such as textiles. The authorities have also stopped using forced child labor in the cotton fields: a practice that had for many years caused Uzbekistan to be the subject of an international boycott.

Control over the media and religion has eased, and practicing Muslims can wear items of religious clothing without fear that they will be seen as Islamists, as they were under Karimov. 

Yet other important reforms planned in the first few years of Mirziyoyev’s administration—such as the privatization of inefficient state companies and banks, an end to the taboo on selling land and property, and repealing the state monopoly on the purchase of cotton—never made it past the stage of declarations. Their swift implementation would have meant the authorities losing control over financial flows and income from major private players.

In addition, a broader look at the statistics shows a less rosy picture. While poverty has indeed decreased under Mirziyoyev, the Gini coefficient for measuring income inequality has grown for three years in a row, from 31.2 in 2022 to 34.6 in 2024.

The gap between the capital and the regions in terms of living standards and salaries also remains large. If in 2020 the average salary in Tashkent was about 74 percent higher than in the poorest Surxondaryo region, by 2024 salaries in the capital were more than double what they were in the Surxondaryo region.

Human labor remains the country’s main export. In 2024, remittances from migrants injected about $16 billion into the economy: 14 percent of Uzbekistan’s GDP, and more than twice the amount raised by exporting gold. 

The country’s aging utilities infrastructure has failed to keep pace with the population growth and construction of new homes, schools, and kindergartens, and some digital services remain unavailable or only work in certain regions. While it’s true that compared with the Karimov era the country has leaped up Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index from 156 place in 2016 to 124 in 2025 (out of 182 countries), it still has a long way to go. Ultimately, for all its outward modernization, Uzbekistan still retains the fundamental features of the Karimov system.

In the first years of Mirziyoyev’s rule, he gained the public’s trust not so much through his economic reforms as purely by virtue of not being Karimov. Stern, aging party figures gave way to modern, open politicians who didn’t avoid difficult questions, and a new generation of educated state officials emerged, many of whom had studied abroad. Even before the reforms had had any palpable effect, the new president had already become a symbol of hope.

Mirziyoyev spoke a lot about the role of parliament and local self-governance, as well as the importance of new political parties and competition among them. In the regions, new political parties began registering.

But everything changed after the 2022 protests in Karakalpakstan, sparked by proposed amendments to the constitution. Just like during the crisis in Andijan back in 2005 under Karimov, the authorities used force against the protesters and people were killed. After that, Mirziyoyev only really trusted a narrow circle of those closest to him—and none more so than his oldest daughter, Saida.

Saida is now de facto the second most powerful person in Uzbekistan, having been appointed deputy chair of the Security Council in August, in addition to her ongoing role as head of the presidential administration. Virtually all key areas of state policy now come under her purview: the economy, infrastructure, the social sector, and international relations. She represents Uzbekistan on the international stage while also dealing with local issues, from air pollution in Tashkent to dilapidated kindergartens and theaters.

No other institutions, including the parliament and courts, have become at all influential. Saida has effectively replaced them. In August, the presidential administration’s special status and responsibilities were enshrined in constitutional law. It now has the right to oversee the operations of the government and regional authorities, and to monitor the compliance of all state bodies with anti-corruption measures, as well as supervise legal reforms. In addition, presidential administration officials have been granted immunity from prosecution, while their family members are provided with diplomatic passports for life. 

In other words, in the tenth year of his presidency, Mirziyoyev’s system is becoming even more personalized than that of his predecessor. Under Karimov, the parliament, courts, and government did not have any real independence either, but his relatives did not have formal authority that put them above all of those institutions.  

Even Karimov’s eldest daughter Gulnara, who was also influential in her day, did not have the kind of power that Saida has today. Gulnara created her own structures and used them to try to influence politics, but she did not integrate them directly into the state system.

While modernizing Uzbekistan, Mirziyoyev has never fully renounced Karimov’s legacy or condemned even his most contentious acts. Having begun his tenure promising change and to distance the country from Karimov, ten years later the president appears to have come full circle. The system has once again reverted to the traditional logic of leadership in Uzbekistan: relying only on a narrow circle of one’s own people and attributing all achievements to the current ruler—and now to his second-in-command too.