Uzbekistan named its new president and Kazakhstan and Armenia replaced their prime ministers yesterday in the biggest political shake-up in post-Soviet central Asia in years.

A joint session of the upper and lower houses of Uzbekistan’s parliament named Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who has been the country’s prime minister since 2003, as acting president following the death last week of Islam Karimov, who had ruled central Asia’s most populous nation since before its independence from the Soviet Union.

Separately, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who also has ruled neighbouring Kazakhstan since Soviet times, initiated the first big reshuffle of his government in more than two years by dismissing prime minister removing Karim Massimov as prime minister and appointing him head of the security services. And in Armenia, prime minister Hovik Abrahamyan resigned in the face of widespread popular dissatisfaction with the government.