Nguyen Phu Trong steps down as Vietnam leader due to health

Lam, Vietnam’s public security minister who recently took office as president, is seen as a potential candidate to replace Trong as party secretary, the most powerful position in the Vietnamese system. On Thursday, Politburo leaders announced that Lam would temporarily take over from Trong.

“The Political Bureau calls on the entire party, the entire people and the entire military to have absolute confidence in the party’s leadership,” the Politburo said in a statement carried by state-run news agencies.

Trong was Vietnam’s president during a period of radical change. Although widely seen as a hardliner within the party, he opened the country to more investment and economic cooperation with foreign countries, while strengthening the party’s grip on internal instability and criticism.

Here’s what we need to know about Trong’s legacy and what his passing means for Vietnam, an increasingly important swing state in the competition between the United States, Russia and China.

Vietnam’s supreme leadership consists of four people who rule by consensus—the General Secretary of the Communist Party, the President, the Prime Minister, and the President of the National Assembly. But the General Secretary of the Party is widely considered the most prominent.

When President Biden visited Hanoi last September to strengthen U.S.-Vietnam relations, he held a one-on-one meeting with Trong, a rare encounter for Biden with a foreign leader who is not a head of state or government.

Educated in the former Soviet Union, Trong rose to the party’s top post in 2011. He was re-elected in 2016, and in 2021 began serving his unprecedented third term as party general secretary.

Vietnam experienced a window of political liberalization in the early 2000s, but that has largely been reversed under Trong, analysts say. Under Trong’s leadership, the party has consolidated and expanded its power, including by pressuring big tech companies like Meta to remove criticism of party leaders from their platforms, enacting legislation to curb freedom of expression, and arresting scores of political dissidents and critics. According to the 88 Project, a watchdog group focused on Vietnam, the government has jailed nearly 200 people on political grounds, including environmental activists, journalists, and trade unionists.

In recent years, Trong has become known for his signature anti-corruption efforts, which have led to the resignation of top party officials, including two state presidents, several regional leaders and dozens of other members of the party’s central committee. The campaign, dubbed “Burning Furnace” in Vietnamese, has led to an extraordinary period of political instability in the country.

“The campaign was intended to reform the system, but in reality it exposed the cancer of corruption and political decay of the system,” said Nguyen Thanh Giang, a Vietnam analyst at the Yusof Ishak Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore.

Under Trong’s leadership, Vietnam has developed warmer relations with its former enemy, the United States. Washington has sought a closer security relationship with Vietnam as a bulwark against growing Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific region. Under pressure to diversify supply chains away from China, U.S. companies have increasingly turned to Vietnam as a close alternative.

For its part, Vietnam has sought to use Washington as a counterweight to Beijing, especially in the face of growing Chinese aggression in the South China Sea, part of which Vietnam claims.

But Vietnam has also maintained strong ties with China and Russia. Trong has hosted both Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Hanoi in recent months.

Analysts say Trong’s stepping down from the party leadership creates a power vacuum within the party, which could exacerbate internal conflicts already brewing over anti-corruption investigations.

Many expect Lam to emerge as Truong’s eventual successor. Lam, who was previously the country’s top police officer, was elevated to president in May, replacing two others who were ousted in quick succession. Human rights groups blame Lam for Vietnam’s crackdown on civil society and fear his rise could lead to more arrests of civil society leaders.

“Over the coming years, we can expect Lam’s brutal repression as police chief to intensify,” said Ben Swinton, co-director of Project 88.