Vietnamese President Vo Van Thuong’s resignation last week amid corruption allegations will have little impact on Vietnam’s direction, the country’s foreign minister said in Washington on Tuesday.
Speaking in English at the Brookings Institution, Foreign Minister Bui Thanh Son said the “collective leadership” model used in Hanoi meant Thuong’s surprise ouster represented only a change of personnel.
“The resignation of the president, I think, will not affect our foreign policy as well as our own [domestic] policy of economic development,” Son said. “We have collective leadership. We have collective foreign policy. We have collective-decided economic-path development.”
Vietnam’s policies, Son said, were not decided by individual leaders but instead by the congresses of the Communist Party of Vietnam every five years. Accordingly, the fact that “one or two figures in the leadership has resigned does not change” much, he explained.
Thuong’s ouster should be “welcomed by the international community” and foreign investors, Son added, calling it a sign of the seriousness of Vietnam’s “Blazing Furnace” anti-graft campaign.
Thuong, who is 53, resigned as president on Wednesday over corruption in Quang Ngai province between 2010 and 2014, while he was serving as the provincial Communist Party secretary. Vice President Vo Thi Anh Xuan is now serving as acting president.
Thuong had only been in office for about a year, having replaced former President Nguyen Xuan Phuc in March 2023 after Phuc stepped down to take responsibility for COVID-19 scandals.
Analysts, though, have speculated his downfall may have been engineered by Public Security Minister To Lam, who could have ambitions to become president or even party secretary-general.
The party secretary-general – currently 79-year-old Nguyen Phu Trong, in power since 2011 and the spearhead of the anti-corruption efforts – is the most powerful figure in Vietnam, followed by the prime minister and the largely ceremonial office of president.
Trong’s current term as secretary-general ends in 2026.
Deepening ties
At Brookings on Monday, Son also spoke about the “long journey” to friendship Vietnam and America had walked since the 1970s.
He praised the turnaround in relations, noting that trade between the two countries had grown 245 times to US$110 billion since bilateral ties were officially normalized in 1995 under the Clinton administration.
“Mutual trust” and “understanding,” he said, is now at a high, marked by last year’s upgrading of relations to a “comprehensive strategic partnership” during U.S. President Joe Biden trip to Hanoi.
That was no small feat, he said.
Normalization of ties still took some two decades after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, Son recalled, with Hanoi and Washington again ending up on opposite sides during the 1980s Cambodian Civil War following Hanoi’s 1979 invasion and occupation of Cambodia.
Backed by the Soviet Union, the last Vietnamese troops did not withdraw from Cambodia until September 1989, prior to the 1991 U.N.-run elections there that came with the end of the Cold War.
“After the [Vietnam] War, when Vietnam helped the Cambodian people cope with the genocidal regime of Pol Pot and [Khmer Rouge Foreign Minister] Ieng Sary … again, the international community and our American friends here still did not understand why,” Son said.
“From the war, and then misunderstanding of each other for quite some time, we entered normalization 30 years after that,” he said.
During his trip to Washington this week, Son also met with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. A readout from the State Department said Son and Blinken discussed, among other things, Hanoi’s human rights record.
Son alluded to those discussions on Tuesday.
“Although we still have differences, we now have goodwill [and] frank and candid dialogue,” he said. “After so many ups and downs, the relationship between our two countries is now a model in international relations, especially for countries currently at war.”
Edited by Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Alex Willemyns for RFA.
By Alex Willemyns for RFA | Radio Free (2024-03-26T19:29:00+00:00) Vietnamese FM: President’s ouster doesn’t change much. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/26/vietnamese-fm-presidents-ouster-doesnt-change-much/
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