By Jonathan D. London
A pressure-packed political succession has entered its final stages.
In Hanoi this week a pressure-packed political succession entered its final stages. But its outcomes remain undetermined. Instead, an intense struggle for power is underway within the country’s divided political elite, with leadership over the Communist Party hanging in the balance. With its expanding economy compromised by institutional weaknesses, its populous clamoring for more transparent and democratic governance, and its foreign relations confronted with escalating regional tensions, the implications of Vietnam’s leadership succession are not to be underestimated and extend well beyond Vietnam.
At the core of tensions is determination of the Party’s leadership for the 12th Party Congress, which will sit until 2021 and which is scheduled to get underway on the 21st of this month. Following tradition, the determination for the new leadership centers on the preparation of a leadership roster, which was to be finalized this week and voted upon next week, and which will ultimately determine who will occupy the positions of party general secretary, prime minister, state president, and national assembly president, among other key positions. The first two positions are the most powerful in Vietnam’s political hierarchy. Yet unlike China and, indeed, unlike most countries, Vietnam lacks a supreme leader and even a commander in chief.
The tensions in Vietnam this week center on a white-hot controversy that concerns both who is to be on the list and who has the right to decide it and thus with whom supreme authority lies.
Until very recently, the most compelling sub-plot in Vietnam’s leadership succession was the contest for the position of party general secretary, which had shaped up as a competition among the current general secretary Nguyen Phu Trong and his supporters on the one hand and the camp of Vietnam’s sitting prime minister, Nguyen Tan Dung, on the other. At this late moment, the question of whether one or neither of these principals will secure leadership remains undecided, even as Trong has by appearances gained the upper hand.
Vietnam’s politics are not meant to be dramatic. Yet within the last few days the competition for the position of general secretary and decisional power over the leadership roster has taken a series of dramatic turns. Perhaps most strikingly, a struggle has emerged over the decisional authority of the current general secretary, the 16-member Politburo he leads, and the 175-member Party’s Central Committee, with a host of retired and current party power-brokers seeking influence to the best of their abilities. It is a political scrum, to put it mildly. And while it is worth knowing who the principal contestants for power are, the most vital questions arising from the leadership succession concern the direction of Vietnam’s politics itself.
Read the full story at The Diplomat