Vietnamese yesterday voted for a new national assembly in a five-yearly election that will bring new faces to the legislature while maintaining the Communist Party's grip on power.
More than 50 million eligible voters out of Vietnam's 84 million people were due to elect 500 new deputies from a field of 875 hopefuls -- including 150 who are not members of the ruling party and 30 self-nominated candidates.
Vietnam has said it wants to broaden public participation in the assembly, but ultimately about 90 percent of seats are guaranteed to go to the party, whose affiliate the Fatherland Front also screened all other candidates.
PHOTO: AFP
Final results are expected within seven to 10 days after voting.
Communist Party chief Nong Duc Manh was among the first to cast his ballot, in Hanoi's government district of Ba Dinh, as propaganda messages starting at 6am urged people to come out quickly and vote as required by law.
"Go to the polls and express the will and the aspirations of the people," said a typical loudspeaker message echoing through the streets of the capital.
"Electing a new and good national assembly serves our cause of industrialization and modernization of the country because deputies will be the bridge between the national assembly and the people," the message said.
The legislature has changed in recent years from being a purely rubber-stamp body into a debating forum that has occasionally grilled top officials in sessions broadcast on national television.
Deputies have complained loudly of corruption and passed laws that bring the country in line with the rules of the WTO, which Vietnam, a low-income but rapidly growing economy, joined early this year.
Manh said the 12th assembly's task would be to push forward reforms with the aim of "bringing Vietnam out of the list of less developed countries by 2010 and becoming a modern industrialized country by 2020."
Vietnamese leaders have made clear that they will tolerate no open challenge to the sole rule of the party which has dominated public life in unified Vietnam since the end of the "American War" in 1975.
In recent months, Vietnam has tried and jailed several political dissidents who had urged an election boycott or called for a multi-party political system, triggering protests from the US and the EU.
In yesterday's election, no controversial candidates were likely to be elected as all of them had to gain the support of their workplaces and neighborhoods, which have their own party cells, as well as the Fatherland Front.
Meanwhile, women, ethnic minorities and key institutions such as the police, army and farmers' unions were all guaranteed blocks of seats in advance.
Vietnam specialist Carl Thayer of the Australian Defence Force Academy said that although more non-party members and self-nominated candidates were running than in the past, the elections "remain a highly contrived affair."
"Central authorities determine in advance the ideal structure and composition of the National Assembly," he said.
In the run-up to the poll, the leadership urged citizens to hoist the national flag. Yesterday, public loud-speakers started playing patriotic songs at dawn, also hailing late revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh.
Official turnout was expected to top 90 percent, as in the 2002 vote.
In an election where there is no doubt about which party will win, the contest is often between wards who compete to be first to finish voting.
At the polling stations, heads of families often cast proxy votes for their relatives, typically with a choice to elect three deputies from five candidates, whose pictures and brief resumes were provided at polling booths.
"I saw that most people casting their ballots are older people," complained one 78-year-old retiree in Hanoi. "They vote for the whole family. It seems that the young voters are lazy."
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
‘BODIES EVERYWHERE’: The incident occurred at a Filipino festival celebrating an anti-colonial leader, with the driver described as a ‘lone suspect’ known to police Canadian police arrested a man on Saturday after a car plowed into a street party in the western Canadian city of Vancouver, killing a number of people. Authorities said the incident happened shortly after 8pm in Vancouver’s Sunset on Fraser neighborhood as members of the Filipino community gathered to celebrate Lapu Lapu Day. The festival, which commemorates a Filipino anti-colonial leader from the 16th century, falls this year on the weekend before Canada’s election. A 30-year-old local man was arrested at the scene, Vancouver police wrote on X. The driver was a “lone suspect” known to police, a police spokesperson told journalists at the
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has unveiled a new naval destroyer, claiming it as a significant advancement toward his goal of expanding the operational range and preemptive strike capabilities of his nuclear-armed military, state media said yesterday. North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said Kim attended the launching ceremony for the 5,000-tonne warship on Friday at the western port of Nampo. Kim framed the arms buildup as a response to perceived threats from the US and its allies in Asia, who have been expanding joint military exercises amid rising tensions over the North’s nuclear program. He added that the acquisition
RSS