Vietnam’s National Assembly yesterday elected Communist Party General Secretary To Lam as president, consolidating the nation’s top party and state roles in a rare concentration of power, as he moves to tighten control and tackle economic headwinds.
Lam was the sole nominee for the five-year post, with the assembly’s approval largely a formality in the one-party state. The 68-year-old received 99 percent of the vote in results announced at the parliamentary session in Hanoi. Former central bank governor Le Minh Hung, the son of a former public security minister who was Lam’s mentor, was elected prime minister for the next five years.
Lam told delegates that his top priority “is to secure peace and stability while promoting rapid, sustainable national development.”
Photo: EPA / National Assembly of Vietnam
While Lam held both jobs briefly in 2024, he is the first person to secure the twin roles at a party congress. Only a small group of Vietnam’s most powerful leaders have simultaneously held the party’s top post and the presidency, including Nguyen Phu Trong, who took on the role after the sitting president’s death in 2018, and Ho Chi Minh in the early years of the modern Vietnamese state.
Vietnam’s leadership structure now moves closer to its communist neighbor, where Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) holds both the party’s top post and the state presidency. Lam has outlined an ambitious reform agenda aimed at streamlining bureaucracy since taking up the party chief post in 2024, cutting red tape and removing barriers to investment as the country seeks to sustain growth.
“While widely expected, this is still a pivotal moment for Vietnamese politics,” said Nguyen Khac Giang, a visiting fellow at Singapore’s ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. “The presidency on its own is largely ceremonial, but in combination with the general secretary role, it becomes politically far more consequential. The real test now is whether he can secure not just compliance, but genuine buy-in from the party’s different factions.”
The Southeast Asian nation, which is targeting annual growth of at least 10 percent this year, is navigating escalating tensions in the Middle East and uncertainty over US tariff policy. Economic momentum slowed in the first quarter, as rising energy costs and price volatility added to inflationary pressures, complicating Lam’s push for double-digit growth.
A former police officer, Lam rose through the public security ministry to eventually become minister, where he was the primary enforcer of a sweeping anti-corruption campaign that netted everyone from presidents to deputy prime ministers and tycoons.
Since taking over as party chief in August 2024 after the death of his predecessor, Lam has sped through a clutch of reforms, shrinking the number of provinces by half and cutting a whole tier of local government. The promise is to make doing business easier and faster, but the changes have also caused delays and confusion given the haste with which they have been rolled out.
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