Officials: Vietnam’s Communist elite pick new boss

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — Vietnam’s Communist elite selected a new party boss Tuesday, party insiders said, after a week of secret meetings at which politicians jockeyed for power before choosing a moderate now tasked with trying to sustain country’s explosive growth.

As widely expected, Nguyen Phu Trong, 66, current chairman of the lawmaking National Assembly, was tapped to be the next general secretary of the Communist Party, according to the party officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information to the media.

In addition, three high-ranking party members — who are expected to be appointed to the country’s other top slots — were re-elected to the all-powerful Politburo, the party officials said.

Analysts have long said that no matter who ended up in the top jobs, the carefully choreographed direction of the country will not deviate from the path already mapped out by the ruling collective.

“This is not a system that goes for the jugular, and you throw one side out and keep the other in,” said Carl Thayer, a Vietnam expert at the Australian Defense Force Academy in Canberra. “It’s a battle for the positions, and you divide up the spoils.”

Nearly 1,400 delegates, greeting each other as “comrade,” met Monday to vote for the new 200-member Central Committee, which selected the new party chief and all-powerful Politburo on Tuesday. The congress wraps up Wednesday after eight days filled with pomp and circumstance along with hammer-and-sickle propaganda.

Trong is a Soviet-trained former editor of Vietnam’s Journal of Communism and has been the party’s chief Marxist theorist. He is considered a moderate and replaces retiring Nong Duc Manh, 70.

Truong Tan Sang, 61, the party’s No. 2, is expected to be chosen as president after reportedly being elbowed from the party boss position. Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, 61, is expected to retain his job. Both were re-elected to the Politburo.

The president’s post is mostly ceremonial, while the prime minister is responsible for running the country’s day-to-day affairs. The head of the National Assembly also will be decided, but the positions will not officially be announced until they are confirmed by parliament later this year.

In a classified cable sent by Michael Michalak, outgoing U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, and obtained by the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks, Sang and Dung were described as “known commodities: pragmatic, market-oriented and in favor of steady, incremental advances in Vietnam’s relationship with the United States.” The cable was posted last week by the British newspaper The Guardian.

Dung, a former Viet Cong guerrilla during the Vietnam War, has shown a strong desire to strengthen relations with the U.S., from trade and investment to military relations and nuclear power. Thayer said despite a new foreign minister being picked, Dung would likely continue working closely with Washington, especially as neighboring China takes a stronger stance over disputed territories in the South China Sea claimed by a number of countries, including Vietnam.

The new leadership will be faced with wide-ranging economic woes, including huge trade and current account deficits, weak currencies and double-digit inflation that’s squeezing the country’s poor by driving up food prices. Vietnam also is wrangling with a financial scandal at a state-owned shipbuilding company that has blighted its global image.

Vietnam has rapidly expanded since the one-party government opted to pull the country out of isolation and poverty in the mid-1980s by moving away from failed collective farming and embracing a market economy.

The transition to capitalism has lifted many out of poverty, but the growing gap between rich and poor is visible everywhere, with the high-rolling nouveau riche splurging on imported beef in $35 bowls of the country’s staple noodle soup, pho. The broth can also be bought out of steaming caldrons on street corners for about $1.

At the meeting’s opening broadcast on national television Jan. 12, the current leaders admitted to a spate of failures, ranging from rampant corruption to abuse of power within the party ranks.

They also said Vietnam has averaged economic growth of 7.2 percent a year over the past decade — one of the fastest rates in Asia. However, despite setting a target of 7 to 8 percent annual growth over the next 10 years, they warned it might be difficult to sustain that momentum.