Vietnam’s Communist Party is meeting in Hanoi to decide the country’s course for the next five years. But all eyes are on the leadership.
To Lam or not To Lam
The Vietnamese Communist Party’s five-yearly congress, which began on Monday, will wrap up tomorrow, two days earlier than planned. The truncated timetable suggests that there is little opposition to re-electing the country’s current leader To Lam as general secretary.
What remains uncertain is whether Lam will also assume the post of president in a consolidation of state and party power under a single leader similar to China’s Xi Jinping. The 1,600 delegates are expected to finish voting today to elect 200 members of the party’s central committee, who will in turn choose the general secretary and up to 19 members of the politburo.
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A former head of state security, Lam led an anti-corruption drive that purged numerous party officials in an exercise reminiscent of Xi’s. Since assuming the leadership in 2024, he has overseen administrative reforms that have cut the number of government ministries and agencies and consolidated 63 provinces into 34 administrative units.
In his speech to the congress on Tuesday, Lam promised that Vietnam’s economy, already one of the fastest-growing in Asia, would grow by more than 10 per cent each year until the end of the decade. A 20 per cent tariff imposed by Donald Trump has not halted the growth of Vietnam’s exports to the United States and the economy grew by 8 per cent in 2025.
Vietnam has long had a policy of balancing its relationships with the US and China, and it generally avoids taking sides in disputes between the two superpowers. China is an important economic partner but the two neighbours have maritime disputes in the South China Sea that have seen confrontations involving coast guard and survey vessels.
Vietnam’s “bamboo diplomacy” emphasises flexibility, resilience and independence in foreign policy, allowing Hanoi to take a neutral stance in great power competition while it enjoys a deep security relationship with Washington and important economic ties with Beijing. The country also plays a major role in regional organisations including ASEAN and enjoys close diplomatic relationships with Russia, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia and the EU among others.
Even if Lam succeeds in becoming president as well as general secretary, he is unlikely to become as powerful a figure in Vietnam as Xi is in China. Vietnam has a collective leadership structure with five pillars: party general secretary, state president, prime minister, national assembly chair and the standing member of the party secretariat.
The military, which traditionally supplies the president, remains a powerful force that remained immune to Lam’s anti-corruption purges and it is unlikely to cede the presidency without some assurances or checks on the leader’s power. And unlike in China, the party is not expected to abolish the rule that limits the leader to two terms in office.
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