It can raise its voice

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“Unless party leaders work harder to incorporate the increasingly powerful business elite into the political system, they risk becoming irrelevant in the long term,” says one foreign diplomat. Phung Anh Tuan, a lawyer and board member of the Ho Chi Minh City young business association, thinks the country will benefit if more business people are brought into the fold. “So many of the issues we face are economic in nature and the Vietnamese leadership needs a lot more technocrats with experience of business, economics and law,” he says.



For a long time, Vietnam’s national assembly was little more than a rubber stamp. But the body changed markedly during its last session, as deputies became more outspoken while Vietnam battled economic woes – from overheating to the global financial crisis and the near-collapse of Vinashin, a heavily indebted state-owned shipbuilder. “Even if Vietnam does not acknowledge the separation of powers, the national assembly has become more of a proper legislative body and that has led to better laws, better allocation of resources and more checks and balances,” says one foreign diplomat who has worked closely with the assembly.



On Sunday, 827 candidates, 86 per cent of them party members, will be competing for 500 parliamentary seats. Most of the contestants have been recommended by the central or local government, but 15, such as Mr Huan, have nominated themselves. Voting is compulsory but despite the government’s protestations to the contrary, political analysts say Vietnam’s electoral process is far from free and fair. Leaders use a variety of tactics, including gerrymandering and strict vetting of candidates, to ensure that most senior party officials are returned successfully and that those who are too outspoken are weeded out. At the previous ballot, in 2007, only one of 32 self-nominated candidates was elected.



However, Vietnam’s elections are still more open than those held in other one-party communist states such as Cuba and China, according to Edmund Malesky, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego. He points out that there is a broader range of candidates, more competition for seats and a greater risk of senior officials losing. Such sentiments provide scant comfort to Le Quoc Quan, a Hanoi-based dissident and one of 68 self-nominated candidates who were prevented from standing. The lawyer, who was jailed in 2007 after completing a fellowship at the National Endowment for Democracy, a lobby group in Washington, believes the national assembly will remain ineffectual unless it is elected in a genuinely democratic way. “It can raise its voice now but it can’t bring about change on larger, more important issues,” he says.
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James Hookway of the Wall Street Journal takes a look at Vietnam’s turbulent economy through the lens of Vinashin, its sprawling state-run shipbuilder. In December, the company missed its first repayment on a $600m loan from a bunch of prominent international creditors, led by Credit Suisse. “Some of Vinashin’s lenders now complain that they have been deceived,” the article notes. They expected Vietnam’s government, which wrote a letter of support for the company at the time of the loan, to step in and make them whole. I haven’t seen the letter, but I wonder if they were wholly justified in that expectation. The lenders charged a 7.15% interest rate, arranged at a time (early 2007) when Vietnam’s dollar-denominated sovereign bonds were yielding only about 5.75%. Surely Vinashin’s lenders expected to run some risk in exchange for the extra return?

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