The hard sales pitch mounted by Uzbekistan’s government for this weekend’s constitutional referendum has produced the requisite outcome.

One key objective for the April 30 vote was to get as many people as possible out to polling stations. 

On May 1, election officials announced that almost 85 percent of voters turned out to cast their ballot. From that total, more than 90 percent approved changes to the constitution that will, among other things, give President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, 65, the option to serve two more seven-year terms. 

There is now speculation afoot that a snap presidential election will be called for later this year. If that comes to pass, Mirziyoyev will be able to stay office until 2037, unless he opts to step aside. Under now-defunct rules, his current and last permitted five-year term was due to expire in 2026.

Not that this is the aspect of the referendum that government proxies are choosing to stress.

In remarks disseminated among the international press by a London-based public relations agency, Jakhongir Shirinov, a prominent lawmaker, described the vote as a triumph for democracy.

“We now stand proudly before the dawn of a new Uzbekistan as one nation; one created by its people for its people as a modern democratic state,” Shirinov was quoted as saying in a statement prepared by Sans Frontieres Associates on behalf of the parastatal Uzbekistan Development Strategy Center. “We look forward to beginning implementing these reforms, which will benefit every individual’s rights, freedoms, and opportunities.”

Advocates for the reform rest their argument on the expanded array of rights ostensibly enshrined in the new constitution.

The number of articles in the document has gone up from 128 to 155. 

Updated language includes provisions guaranteeing the right to dignified working conditions and free healthcare and education. A provision explicitly forbidding evictions without an existing court ruling is a tacit acknowledgement of the excesses that have been perpetrated over the course of Uzbekistan’s ongoing construction boom. Language has further been included to provide more protections for women, disabled people, and criminal suspects.

Skeptics are unconvinced that a bright new era of political liberalization is imminent, however.

“I think that what we are seeing here is a standard instrument of authoritarian consolidation,” Luca Anceschi, professor of Eurasian Studies at Glasgow University, told Eurasianet. “Even if the government says that they changed 65 percent of the constitution, the only rule that matters is the one about term-limit removal.”

There was arguably nothing stopping from the Uzbek authorities from lavishing their population with what they now claim are their newly won rights, Anceschi argued.

“I don’t really think that rights in Uzbekistan were denied because the prior constitution did not have the articles that enshrined those rights,” he said. “It’s not the actual draft that matters, but the interpretation and implementation.”

Sure enough, Uzbekistan has won plaudits for working to stamp out abuses, even in the run-up to this vote.

In March, President Mirziyoyev approved changes to the criminal code that introduced penalties for any official compelling teachers and healthcare workers from doing any work not related to their jobs. Those and other state employees have for decades been dragooned, typically by officials in the regions, into taking part in annual cotton harvests.

There are early signs that with the referendum done and dusted, thoughts are quickly turning to other matters. On May 1, even before the preliminary results had been announced, the ubiquitous billboards and adverts on the sides of buses in Tashkent advertising the referendum were already being taken down. 

Even international monitors appear ready to put the whole vote in their rear-view mirror.

A post-referendum press conference held in Tashkent by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, or ODIHR, wrapped up in well under half an hour. Only one reporter posed a question.

ODIHR’s preliminary report may nevertheless make for awkward reading in the Mirziyoyev administration, which has taken considerable pains to also sell the referendum as a liberalizing exercise to an international audience. Monitors noted that while the referendum was of a piece with broader ongoing reforms, it took place “in an environment short of genuine political pluralism and competition.”

“This highlighted the need to further encourage alternative views, provide opportunities for independent civil society and respect for fundamental freedoms, which continue to be restricted,” the ODIHR report noted.

Criticisms were also reserved for the fact that voters were required to express a single position on a disparate range of constitutional issues. 

“The proposed amendments affecting approximately two-thirds of the Constitution were voted on as a single package, not providing the opportunity for voters to make a choice about each distinct issue featured in the amendments, and not in line with international good practice,” ODHIR monitors said.

If the purpose of the referendum was to instill an invigorated sense of nationwide confidence in the country’s rulers, the jury is still open. In the absence of genuine and open conversations on political matters and credible independent polling to gauge the public’s mood, observers may only guess at whether the vote was successful.

Farkhod Tolipov, a Tashkent-based political analyst, is doubtful that the figures declared by vote officials truly capture sentiments at large.

“This referendum was conducted in the spirit of Soviet campaigning. With a fanfare, as it were. Even the results of the referendum were in that spirit: 90 percent of the votes were cast in support of the new text of the constitution,” Tolipov told Eurasianet. “I am sure that this figure, even if it is real, does not reflect actual levels of support for the constitutional law, given how little citizens know about its contents, which were devised in private and without the requisite public and critical conversations.”