Tajikistan’s Ubiquitous and ‘Irreplaceable’ Leader · Global Voices
Alexander Sodiqov

As in most other Central Asian countries, the portraits of the president are everywhere in Tajikistan. Blogger Rustam Gulov (aka Teocrat) believes [ru] that these portraits serve a political purpose:
[The portraits] are all parts of a giant machine designed to convince the people in Tajikistan that this person [the president] is irreplaceable. As a result, people develop a conviction that there are no other persons in the country who could be in a position to challenge ‘His Highness’ at the polls.
A giant portrait of the president mounted on the building of the Ministry of Agriculture in central Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. Image by Alexander Sodiqov, July 2013.