ASEAN Beat | Politics | Southeast Asia

Vietnam’s Communist Party Wins 97% of Seats in National Assembly Election

The new legislature will soon convene to select leaders for key state institutions, as the country begins to suffer the backwash from the conflict in the Middle East.

The facade of the National Assembly building in Hanoi, Vietnam.

The Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) won nearly 97 percent of the seats in the National Assembly after an election last week, according to results released by ​the Vietnamese government yesterday.

According to the National Election Council, the CPV won 482 seats in the 500-seat legislature, down from 485 in ​the outgoing parliament. During the March 15 election, voters also selected delegates for People’s Councils at the province and commune levels.

Tran Thanh Man, the chairperson of the National Assembly and chairman of the National Election Council, praised the conduct of the election, which saw a characteristically high turnout of around 99 percent.

“This was one of the largest and most demanding elections to date, both in terms of scale and workload, particularly as it took place amid new challenges and complexities compared to previous terms,” he told a meeting on Saturday, according to a state media report.

Like the National Assembly itself, which has little power to challenge decisions made by the CPV’s Central Committee, Vietnam’s parliamentary elections are more or less cosmetic. Just under 93 percent of the 864 parliamentary candidates who took part in the March 15 election were members of the CPV. The remaining 7.5 percent were independents, who were elected to the remaining 18 seats in the Assembly, up from 14 at the last legislative election in 2021.

On Saturday, Ta Thi Yen, the vice chair of the Committee for Deputy Affairs, said that the increase “marks a meaningful expansion of democracy and representation within the National Assembly.”

However, the most important aspect of the election was that the formation of a new National Assembly opens the way to key state personnel appointments in the coming weeks. As Reuters explains, the........

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