HANOI, Vietnam (AP) – Nearly 1,600 senior members of Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party meet this week to approve future policies and help select the country’s top leaders amid talks about whether the current party leader will stay.
Secretary General Nguyen Phu Trong, 76, defied conventional wisdom by winning a second term against a favored opponent in 2016. Trong has made a name for itself by leading economic growth and waging a popular war on corruption.
It has been speculated that the selection of the new set of leaders is already a closed deal, but the Vietnamese party is highly secretive and citizens are not even allowed to discuss candidates publicly.
The city streets are lined with the party’s hammer and sickle flags and posters promoting the week-long convention, which is held every five years. About 4,900 people involved in the event will each have to take two tests for the coronavirus.
Vietnam is one of the few remaining communist one-party states in the world that does not tolerate dissent. However, policy is not completely determined from the top down.
In each of Vietnam’s 63 provinces and municipalities, a series of meetings down to the community level was previously held to select the 1,587 delegates. They will elect the 200-member Central Committee, which will elect between 15 and 19 of its members to serve on the Politburo, the highest party body.
The Politburo will make nominations for the “four pillars” – general secretary of the Communist Party, the most powerful job in the country; the president, a largely ceremonial position; The prime minister; and the president of the National Assembly. The nominations are then put to a vote at the party congress.
The Communist Party of Vietnam is known for its collective leadership, meaning important decisions are determined by consensus in the Politburo. The agenda for the conference is determined by the leadership chosen at the last meeting in 2016.
Factions related to senior party leaders means that the competition for the top positions may not be over yet.
“The biggest problem facing the party at the Congress is the appointment of a new generation of leaders. However, due to the different factions within the party, it has proven difficult to reach consensus on someone to replace party leader Nguyen Phu Trong, ”Murray Hiebert, a senior associate of the Southeast Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said. in an email interview.
The party’s rules do not permit anyone to serve who is over 65 and / or has served two terms, but these rules will be waived so that Trong can pursue another term, even though he has had a had been in poor health, ”he said.
According to Tuong Vu, head of the political science department at the University of Oregon, the party leadership seems more united this year than in 2016.
“The challenge this time for the leadership is that the protégé of the current Secretary General Nguyen Phu Trong did not get enough support to replace him,” he said. If his favorite fellow Politburo member Tran Quoc Vuong can’t get enough support, that opens the possibility of Trong getting a third-term waiver, he said.
“Given his ill health and advanced age, this also generates uncertainties about future succession,” said Vu.
Nguyen Khac Giang, a scientist in Vietnam affairs at Victoria University in New Zealand, also suggested that Trong’s stay could disrupt the succession process.
“Trong would be too powerful and that would hinder the collective leadership standard that the party has always followed.” he said. “It would also set a precedent for others to hold on to power and that would make it difficult to sustain leadership and harm the constitution in the long run.”
Trong is benefiting from its track record in economics, Hiebert said.
Vietnam has grown an average of 6% in the last five years and nearly 3% in 2020, when most of its neighbors went into recession thanks to the pandemic, Hiebert said.
“It continued to attract foreign investment that most of its neighbors are jealous of, and got an extra boost when companies tried to pull part of their supply chain out of China in the wake of the US-China trade war.”
On the debit side, Vietnam had problems exploring and exploiting offshore oil and gas due to China’s pressure on its operations in the disputed South China Sea, Hiebert said.
Human rights groups urged the new leadership to focus on those issues.
“The Vietnamese authorities’ intolerance to peaceful dissent has peaked under the outgoing leadership,” Amnesty International said. “The appointment of new national leaders offers Vietnam an invaluable opportunity to change course on human rights.”
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Associated Press writer Grant Peck in Bangkok contributed to this report.