David Hutt

Opinion | Can Vietnam’s new president check the power of its party chief?

Foreign investors and diplomats might soon start looking back with nostalgia on the days of dispute within Vietnam’s Communist Party

Reading Time:3 minutes

Why you can trust SCMP

Vietnam’s newly elected president, Luong Cuong (left), and To Lam, general secretary of the Communist Party, are seen outside the National Assembly in Hanoi on October 21. Photo: AP

David Hutt

Published: 5:30am, 29 Oct 2024Updated: 7:49am, 29 Oct 2024

There is a hint of wishful thinking in seeing the appointment of a four-star general as Vietnam’s new president to balance the influence of the domestic security hawks with increased authority for the military as a welcome return to normalcy in Hanoi.

Last week’s elevation of Luong Cuong, formerly the top political commissar of Vietnam’s armed forces, to head of state did reconstruct the “four pillars” system, which divides the four main political offices between four individuals, a way of avoiding one-man rule like in China. For much of this year, To Lam was both party chief and state president.

Yet what power-sharing stability exists is now almost entirely divided between the military and public security apparatus – who now occupy the majority of seats in the Politburo – while most other consensus-seeking checks and balances exist to be ignored.

Age or term limits have become suggestions routinely disregarded. Experience has been relegated to the exigencies of factional manoeuvring. Under party rules, it was actually Luong Cuong as standing chairman of the party’s secretariat, not To Lam, who was supposed to be acting party chief after Nguyen Phu Trong’s death in July.

These are lean times for the Communist Party of Vietnam, which has been hollowed out by the relentless “blazing furnace” anti-corruption campaign orchestrated for the past eight years by Trong.

But whereas Trong was an ideologue who saw the concentration of power as a justifiable means to restore socialist morality to a party existentially challenged by corruption, To Lam – formerly the public security minister and Trong’s enforcer – holds no such lofty illusions. His power grab is motivated by more parochial concerns.