Vietnam’s most senior political leader has died, leaving behind a vacuum in the party : NPR

AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:

The leader of Vietnam’s Communist Party has died at the age of 80. Nguyen Phu Trong was the party’s general secretary, and his duties will be temporarily carried out by the country’s president. Michael Sullivan has more on the future of the party’s leadership.

MICHAEL SULLIVAN, BYLINE: Vietnam has no official leader, but the job of party chief has long been the most powerful in the country, a position that Nguyen Phu Trong held for a record three terms, beginning in 2011. An old-school Leninist educated in the Soviet Union – a hard-line true believer who paradoxically oversaw much of the country’s increased economic and political engagement with the West.

Giang Nguyen is a visiting fellow at Singapore’s Institute for Southeast Asian Studies.

GIANG NGUYEN: He wielded enormous power over ideology, meaning the education, the media in Vietnam and the way even the police in Vietnam suppresses social media. It’s all come from him because he was a man of ideology, a bit like the Ayatollahs in Iran, yeah? They were in charge of – how to say – to safeguard the purity of the faith.

SULLIVAN: The people’s faith in the party, however, has been waning over the years, due in large part to endemic corruption, something Nguyen Phu Trong recognized as an existential threat to the party’s continued rule, which is why he launched a so-called blazing furnace anticorruption drive after assuming the top job.

ALEXANDER VUVING: That is his legacy.

SULLIVAN: Alexander Vuving is a professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.

VUVING: This has become the defining effort by the party in domestic politics. It has become a major mechanism for the party to clean itself from the elements that it do not want to keep in the party, but it has not been successful.

SULLIVAN: The campaign has had some limited success. It’s even cost several senior party officials their jobs. But corruption remains rampant in government and in business.

NGUYEN: By exposing the party to sunlight, running that blazing furnace anti-corruption campaign, actually, he has not rebuilt but undermined people’s trust, the public trust in the party.

SULLIVAN: Again, analyst Giang Nguyen.

NGUYEN: We are talking about corruptions with hundred of million dollars changing hand, disappearing. I’m quoting official press. So people ask questions. OK, so where would it end? And the party he leaves behind has to deal with corruption, infighting and also quite a fractured relationship between the new president, who was a top policeman, and other people within the political establishment.

SULLIVAN: That top-policeman-turned-president, To Lam, is considered a strong candidate to succeed Nguyen Phu Trong as party chief and has vowed to continue the blazing furnace campaign. But his elevation is far from a lock. Alexander Vuving.

VUVING: It’s still very hard to predict the future of Vietnam’s domestic politics.

SULLIVAN: In part because Nguyen Phu Trong left no clear successor – but whoever ends up leading the party, analysts say it’s highly unlikely there will be any big changes to Vietnam’s carefully calibrated pragmatic foreign policy that treats both the U.S. and China as friends, at a time when Vietnam is also keen on spurring economic growth with the help of foreign investors looking to diversify their China-dependent supply chains. If To Lam does end up on top, it’s likely to be bad news for Vietnamese looking for more political freedom in a country that already brooks almost no dissent. Alexander Vuving.

VUVING: I think that because To Lam’s background and his power base in the security apparatus – he would use the security apparatus to consolidate power, and so that is likely to lead to a tighter control of the country.

SULLIVAN: For NPR News, I’m Michael Sullivan in Chiang Rai, Thailand.

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