Overview
- Tô Lâm, who was elected president by the National Assembly on Tuesday, now holds both the Communist Party’s top job and the head-of-state role.
- He had already secured another five-year term as general secretary at the party congress in January, a post widely seen as the country’s most powerful.
- Vietnam usually spreads authority across four posts — party chief, president, prime minister, and National Assembly chair — and only once before, from 2018 to 2021 under Nguyễn Phú Trọng, were the top two combined.
- From 2016 to 2024 Lâm served as public security minister, and a Berlin court found he ordered the 2017 abduction of Trịnh Xuân Thanh from a central Berlin park, a case that strained ties with Germany before relations later stabilized.
- Human Rights Watch called the leadership selection undemocratic and opaque and reported arrests of prominent critics before the congress, including blogger Hoàng Thị Hồng Thái, raising concerns that civic space could tighten under the new alignment.