To Lam Confirmed as Vietnam’s Top Leader
President To Lam of Vietnam, best known for implementing a sweeping anticorruption drive, will become the country’s next Communist Party general secretary, the government’s Politburo announced on Saturday.
General secretary is the top job in Vietnam’s political system of collective leadership, and Mr. Lam was named to the post temporarily in July, after the death of Nguyen Phu Trong, who had been general secretary since 2011.
The appointment gives Mr. Lam the chance to consolidate his position within the party before it holds its congress in 2026 to select the country’s top leaders for the following five years.
“He might be the starting horse in the race for 2026, but he has to go through a particular process,” said Carl Thayer, a Vietnam expert and emeritus professor of politics at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, Australia. He added: “There is a lot of space in there for people to oppose him.”
Mr. Lam’s rise from within the party ranks has been rapid. He was named president in May after serving as the minister of public security. In that position, Mr. Lam implemented Mr. Trong’s anticorruption campaign, known as “blazing furnace,” which targeted Vietnam’s rampant official corruption, sending many officials to jail and leading others to resign.
He pledged to continue the effort as president, even as business leaders in Vietnam and international investors had begun to complain that the campaign had led to paralysis for new projects, sending a chill through the economy.
The U.S. Commerce Department said on Friday that it would continue to classify Vietnam as a nonmarket economy country, denying Vietnam’s request for an upgrade that would have reduced the punitive antidumping duties levied on economies shaped by heavy state influence. American officials stressed that the decision was not punitive, and would not hinder efforts to improve relations and economic ties between the two countries.
The U.S. move, though likely to displease some leaders in Hanoi, is unlikely to significantly alter Vietnam’s foreign policy approach, according to another Vietnam expert. “Geopolitically, Hanoi still needs Washington to counterbalance Beijing’s influence in the region,” said Nguyen Khac Giang, a visiting fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, a research organization in Singapore.
Mr. Thayer said that the position of party chief will be a test for Mr. Lam, forcing him to manage complex foreign relations and a wide range of views about the anticorruption drive.
“When he was minister of public security, it was top down,” Mr. Thayer said. “Now he has to be a consensus builder.”
Vietnam, one of the world’s few remaining Communist autocracies, is led by a collective of four leaders known as the four pillars — the party general secretary, the president, the prime minister and the chairman of the National Assembly. The general secretary is seen as having the most powerful role, but responsibility is well distributed. The president, for example, is the military’s commander in chief.
At various points, the country’s leaders have debated whether to centralize some of that power by combining the role of president and party chief, but there has long been a consensus about the need for stability with a power-sharing system that might prevent the rise of a single all-powerful leader. Regardless of who serves in the top position, policy is set by the party as a whole, and major changes are not expected.
“The policies are set in stone,” Mr. Thayer said, adding: “The driving force is to be a modern industrial country by 2045 with a high income.”
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