Vietnamese leader To Lam recently spent a week in Indonesia and Singapore, where he celebrated the 70th and 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations, respectively, and elevated ties to “comprehensive strategic partnership,” Vietnam’s highest ranking.
Such high-level visits are not unusual given Hanoi’s close ties with those fellow ASEAN countries. But what’s striking about this tour is that Lam, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), is playing the top diplomat role, normally the duty of the president or prime minister.
By doing this, Lam has made clear that he sees the CPV’s most powerful post as having executive functions in the party-state never taken on by his predecessors, who were focused on policy and ideology.
Lam, as minister of public security, weaponized counter-corruption investigations to systematically remove rivals from the CPV Politburo from December 2022 to mid-2024, culminating in his election as president in May 2024.
Following the death of the longtime CPV General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong in July 2024, state President Lam was elevated to the top party spot.
Some observers believe Lam tried to hold onto the presidency, but that was seen as an unacceptable accumulation of power that violated Vietnam’s norm of collective leadership.
He relinquished the presidency and in October 2024, Luong Cuong was appointed to replace him.
Cuong, who served as the Army’s top political commissar, was viewed as an institutional check on the growing clout of the Ministry of Public Security within the CPV’s senior ranks.
Tightening his grip
But Lam has clearly consolidated power since then.
He has been able to install key allies in critically important positions.
These include Luong Tam Quang who succeeded him as minister of public security, and another deputy, Nguyen Duy Ngoc from the Central Committee office.
Le Minh Hung heads the VPV’s organization Commission, which makes him the de facto head of human resources for the party, a key position ahead of the next five-year party congress in January.
Rounding out Lam’s inner circle are deputy prime minister Nguyen Hoa Binh; Do Van Chien, former head of the Supreme Court who heads the party’s mass mobilization arm, the Vietnam Fatherland Front; and foreign policy guru Le Hoai Trung, now Lam’s chief of staff.
Lam has put his loyalists on an expanded CPV Politburo, which at its nadir last year, due to forced retirements, had just 13 members. Ngoc was elevated to the Politburo in violation of party rules that require having served a full term on the Central Committee.
Politburo expansion matters for another reason: The norm is that no more than 50% of the politburo gets replaced at a party congress. Expanding the top decision-making body gives Lam more maneuvering room to retire any remaining rivals.
Reinforcing his power is his de facto control of the Ministry of Public Security through his protégé Luong Tam Quang. And his recent installation of former security deputy Ngoc as the head of the CPV’s Central Inspection Commission, the party corruption watchdog, has expanded his ability to weaponize counter-corruption investigations.
In short, anyone within the Central Committee who poses a threat or presents a challenge to Lam ahead of the 14th Congress in January is likely to face legal jeopardy. Central Committee compliance at the party congress is expected to be high.
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Supreme confidence
We have seen just how secure Lam is going into the Congress. Normally, decision-making and policy implementation crawls to a standstill in the year preceding a Congress.
Yet, this year we have seen unprecedented policy implementation in the form of a major government restructuring that eliminated five government ministries, three state-level commissions, and cut over 100,000 public sector jobs.
The reforms are impacting the provinces too, with a proposed consolidation of smaller provinces and the proposed elimination of all district level offices.
Leaders rarely embark on such bold policies if their re-election is in doubt.
Lam is very concerned about Vietnam falling into the middle income trap, and worries about bureaucratic inefficiency, and is acting with added urgency.
The general secretary is a very different figure than his predecessor.
With the exception of a four year stint as chairman of the National Assembly, Trong’s six decade-long career was spent within the party, and almost all of that as a theoretician.
As the party’s top ideologue, Trong’s job was to “set the line” for policy.
Lam is doing something fundamentally different, turning the general secretary into an executive position.
He’s not just setting the bookends in which policy can be deliberated, he’s proactively leading policy, formulation, and implementation.
Lam may have been forced to cede the presidency last September, but there is no doubt that he is the top diplomat.
State-led capitalism
For eight years, Lam was the party’s top enforcer and defender of its monopoly of power, but he was no ideologue. Communism was simply a means to an end.
There is a shrewd, ruthless pragmatism to Lam who sees CPV legitimacy coming from economic performance.
Vietnam, under his tenure, is likely to remain every bit as authoritarian, but operate more in the mold of state-led capitalism.
Lam has clearly looked to China’s supreme leader Xi Jinping for selective inspiration.
At the 14th Congress, he may push again for the general secretary post and the presidency to be conjoined, as in China.
Lam has systematically removed rival factions, and surrounded himself with a small core of empowered loyalists.
But most of all, like Xi, he sees himself as the man of the moment, the only person capable of taking on needed structural reforms, while maintaining the party’s monopoly of power.
And as Xi ran the tables at the 20th Congress in October 2022, Lam is poised to do the same at the CPV’s 14th.
What could make this possible, is the way that Lam has reinvented the position of general secretary, assuming executive functions, in a way that none of his predecessors in the Doi Moi era have.
Zachary Abuza is a professor at the National War College in Washington and an adjunct at Georgetown University. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of the U.S. Department of Defense, the National War College, Georgetown University or Radio Free Asia.