The National Assembly (NA) of Vietnam recently convened its 9th extraordinary session in an attempt to clear institutional bottlenecks and pave the way for what new Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) chief To Lam has described as the “new era of national rise.”
Since the beginning of the current governing term in May 2021, the NA has met for eight regular sessions, as prescribed by the Vietnamese Constitution. The main purpose of the special session convened on February 12-19 was to enact the decisions of the CPV Central Committee and Politburo under Lam’s leadership. Many of these limit the powers of the NA itself, reversing the steps that the Party had taken toward empowering the NA as a political check on decisions of national importance.
In service of Lam’s program of restructuring and administrative streamlining, the NA has approved laws merging and eliminating a number of NA Committees and removing standing members and full-time members of these Committees. The Foreign Affairs Committee has been abolished, the Economic Committee has been merged into the Committee of Finance and Budget, the Judiciary Committee has been merged into the Law Committee, and the Social Affairs Committee has been merged into the Committee on Culture and Education. Many of these committees were established after the now deceased General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, Lam’s predecessor, assumed the office of the chairman of the NA in 2006. In January of this year, the Institute of Legislative Studies, founded by Trong himself in 2008 as an initiative to empower the NA, was also terminated.
These moves are widely seen as a follow-up to the political demise of Vuong Dinh Hue, who was removed as NA chairman in May 2024 in connection with the country’s anti-corruption drive. Over the last two years, two other NA high-ranking officials were also removed from office after being disciplined by the Politburo: NA General Secretary Bui Van Cuong and Nguyen Phu Cuong, the chairman of the NA’s Committee on Finance and Budget. With the dissolution of the NA Committee for Foreign Affairs, its chairman has been reduced to a full-time party cadre at the NA and is no longer in the foreign policy making circles.
Most importantly, the declining agency of the NA in national decision-making features prominently in the amendments to the law on law-making, officially known as the Law on the Promulgation of Legal Normative Documents. The development of this law over the last two decades has seen the NA and its committees assume an important role in the legislative process, particularly in the two most recent versions of the law drafted in 2008 and 2015, which were overseen by Trong as NA chairman and party chief, respectively.
The amendments to the law reverse the previous efforts, particularly those built into the 2015 version, to give NA committees and deputies more agency in directing legislative policy-making and stricter oversight power over the government. The newly passed law returns many of the powers in the legislative process to accord the government a freer hand in policy formulation and execution. As the incumbent NA President Tran Thanh Man recently put it:
It is imperative to comprehensively reform the mindset and approach to lawmaking. Legal documents must be concise, clear, and only regulate matters within the jurisdiction of the National Assembly; decentralization and delegation of authority to the Government should be strengthened. Laws should limit the codification of detailed content under the Government’s authority, instead providing a general framework to ensure flexibility in management and administration.
The NA is now back to its former role of making only general framework laws, which was heavily criticized decades ago. As such, the government’s decrees and ministerial circulars carry greater weight in policy-making and implementation. Even though the rule of law is far from being built in Vietnam, various efforts have been made to establish the rule of law as the cornerstone of the socialist law-based state. However, with these new movements, the rule by decree, which gives vast discretionary powers to the government and its ministries, is back in full force.
Among the various results of the doi moi reforms that began in the late 1980s was the quiet infiltration of a law-based state rubric, and the increasingly important role of the National Assembly in Vietnam’s politics. However, it was not until the election of then NA Chairman Nong Duc Manh as the CPV general secretary in April 2001 and Nguyen Van An’s takeover as the NA chairman that the legislature’s prominence began to increase significantly. Before this, the NA had functioned mostly as a rubber-stamp in the national decision-making process. Nguyen Van An introduced a few reforms, notably allowing live broadcasting of NA deputies’ question and answer sessions to increase transparency and enhance the NA’s oversight powers.
The reforms starting in the early 2000s, and accelerating after Politburo Resolution 48 on the development of the legal system in 2005, have enabled the NA to take on a more dynamic role in Vietnamese policymaking, rather than simply ratifying decisions from the CPV Central Committee and Politburo. The bedrock of the NA reforms was to increase the proportion of full-time deputies in the 500-member legislature and professionalize the operations of the NA committees. There has been a steady increase in the number of full-time deputies over the past few decades. Before 2000, only around 5 percent of the NA members were full-time. After the 2002 NA election, the number had reached 24 percent, and hit a record high of nearly 40 percent in the current term beginning in 2021. The designated structure of the CPV Central Committee also assigns seats to all members of the 18-seat NA Standing Committee. It has become a common practice that two Politburo members would be drawn from the NA. With the rise of the NA in the power structure, the “trio” leadership of CPV general secretary, state president, and prime minister was transformed into a “four-pillar” model with the NA chairman now being viewed as one of the core leaders of the party-state.
Under this system, NA deputies have been empowered to question the performance of ministers and even the prime minister. For instance, NA deputies Nguyen Minh Thuyet and Duong Trung Quoc were bold enough to suggest the resignation of the Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung at live-broadcast grilling sessions in 2010 and 2012. Edmund Malesky, a political economist specializing in Vietnam, recognized the role of Vietnam’s NA as an evolving institution within a one-party system, noting that while the NA had historically been a rubber-stamp body, it had gradually gained more influence, particularly in areas such as policy debate, oversight, and accountability. Overseen by Trong, the NA was able to reject government proposals to construct megaprojects, including the north-south high-speed rail link in 2010 and the nuclear energy program in 2016 – both of which have been revived by the government in recent months.
Over the years, however, critical voices at the NA have been either marginalized or silenced. Luu Binh Nhuong and Le Thanh Van are two of the most outspoken critics from the NA, whose arrests and subsequent trials earlier this year symbolically marked the end of the NA’s ascendancy.
The Party has recently tightened its control over the policymaking space, reducing the National Assembly’s ability to challenge executive decisions. Now that decision-making has shifted toward the Politburo and CPV-run institutions and the executive branch of the state has gained greater control over policy implementation, the NA will find its influence reduced.
The most recent personnel selection in 2021 showcased stronger Party control over candidate selection. There was a sharp drop in seats won by independent and non-Party candidates; in consequence, the NA is dominated by Party members who align with the leadership. Critical voices have been marginalized; internal debate and oversight is significantly less vigorous, and recent restrictions on media coverage and tighter control over online discussion have made it harder for citizens to engage with parliamentary debates. A more reactive and instrumentalist NA is now seen as crucial in untying the hands of the government so that it can lay the path to Vietnam’s “new era of national rise.”