ASHGABAT: Turkmenistan on Saturday announced a snap presidential election for March 12 after autocrat leader Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov said he was ready to step down, with his son expected to succeed him.

“The president ... gave us an instruction to prepare for early presidential elections on March 12,” a spokesman for the election commission, Bezergen Garrayev, told AFP by telephone.

Gas-rich Turkmenistan, a former Soviet republic, is one of the world’s most repressive, secretive states and little is known about how the regime makes day-to-day decisions. Berdymukhamedov is its main face. His pastimes — including horse riding, mass cycling, composing songs and authoring books — are widely covered on the internet.

His 40-year-old son Serdar Berdymukhamedov is now the second most powerful government official with a broad purview over the economy as vice-premier. In a keynote speech in parliament on Friday, Berdymukhamedov said he reached “a difficult decision” about his leadership because of his age, adding that the Central Asian country needed “young leaders”, the state information service TDH reported.

Berdymukhamedov, 64, said the proposal to involve “youth” in the leadership of the country were “approved” at the session, in further quotes that appeared on TDH’s website early on Saturday.