With the death Friday of Vietnam’s long-serving Communist Party general secretary, Nguyen Phu Trong, the country’s top leadership role has been left at least temporarily to President To Lam, who is best known for implementing a sweeping anticorruption drive.
Mr. Lam, 67, was named Thursday to take over the general secretary’s duties at the Politburo, the Party Central Committee and the Secretariat for an unspecified period. He will also continue as president, a largely ceremonial post for which he was chosen just two months ago.
Whether he will retain the duties of general secretary on a more permanent basis depends on the Politburo, which is expected to decide whether to confirm his new role. If it does, Mr. Lam would have the chance to consolidate his position within the party before it holds its next congress in 2026 to select the country’s top leaders for the next five years.
“This has probably set the stage for To Lam to become the next general secretary,” said Nguyen Khac Giang, a visiting fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, a research organization in Singapore. “He would be the front-runner, but it is not certain he would be chosen, because there are different factions in the party that won’t want him to gather so much power.”
Vietnam analysts said it was unlikely that the death of Mr. Trong would lead to any changes in foreign policy or trade relations, as Vietnam will continue balancing its relations with the United States, China and Russia.
Vietnam, one of the world’s few remaining Communist dictatorships, is headed 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 — with the general secretary seen as the most powerful.
Carl Thayer, professor emeritus at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, noted that Mr. Lam is one of only four potential candidates for general secretary who meet the criteria of having served at least five years in the Politburo. He said the first step would be for Mr. Lam to win confirmation as the acting general secretary when the Politburo meets next. It’s not certain exactly when that will happen.
Mr. Trong served as both general secretary and president for three years, but gave up the presidency when the party held its 2021 congress, the year he was elected to an unprecedented third term as general secretary.
As the minister of public security, 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.
That campaign reshaped the Politburo and shook up local politics in many parts of the country, Mr. Thayer said. With the removal of seven of the 18 members of the Politburo, a third of the Politburo’s members now come from the security forces that Mr. Lam headed until May, when he assumed the job of president.
Some may not wish to see Mr. Lam in an even more powerful role. “No one in the top ranks is completely clean,” Mr. Giang said. “The person who controls the security apparatus is in a very strong position.”
Mr. Lam became president after his predecessor, Vo Van Thuong, stepped down, apparently after becoming a casualty of the anticorruption drive. Mr. Thuong was found to have violated regulations for party members, but it was unclear what those regulations were.
In a statement posted to the government’s Facebook account on Saturday, Mr. Lam praised Mr. Trong:
“General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, a great intellect, great talent of the Vietnamese revolution, thinker, culturalist, theoretical flag of the Party, excellent student who constantly studies and follows the ideology of the Party.”
Mr. Lam has created controversy in the past. He was accused of involvement in a high-profile kidnapping of a former Vietnamese provincial official from Berlin in 2017.
And he came under harsh criticism in 2021 after a widely circulated video showed him eating steak covered in 24-karat gold flakes at a London restaurant while Vietnam was under lockdown during the pandemic.
The meal was said to equal the cost of six months’ pay for the average Vietnamese worker. A Vietnamese activist who parodied the meal in a video was sentenced to more than five years in prison last year for “conducting propaganda against the state.”
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