To Lam elected Vietnam's President with 99% vote, consolidating party and state power in rare leadership shift

Vietnam’s National Assembly elected Communist Party chief To Lam as president on Tuesday, consolidating the country’s top party and state roles in a rare concentration of power as he moves to tighten control and tackle economic headwinds.

Lam was the sole nominee for the five-year post, with the assembly’s approval largely a formality in the one-party state. The 68-year-old received 99% of the vote in results announced at the parliamentary session in Hanoi.

My top priority “is to secure peace and stability while promoting rapid, sustainable national development,” Lam told delegates.

While Lam held both jobs briefly in 2024, he’s the first person to secure the twin roles at a party congress. Only a small group of Vietnam’s most powerful leaders have simultaneously held the party’s top post and the presidency, including Nguyen Phu Trong, who took on the role after the sitting president’s death in 2018, and Ho Chi Minh in the early years of the modern Vietnamese state.

Vietnam’s leadership structure now moves closer to its communist neighbor, China, where Xi Jinping holds both the party’s top post and the state presidency. Lam has outlined an ambitious reform agenda aimed at streamlining bureaucracy since taking up the party chief post in 2024, cutting red tape and removing barriers to investment as the country seeks to sustain growth.

“While widely expected, this is still a pivotal moment for Vietnamese politics,” said Nguyen Khac Giang, a visiting fellow at Singapore’s ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. “The presidency on its own is largely ceremonial, but in combination with the general secretary role, it becomes politically far more consequential. The real test now is whether he can secure not just compliance, but genuine buy-in from the party’s different factions.”

The Southeast Asian nation, which is targeting annual growth of at least 10% this year, is navigating escalating tensions in the Middle East and uncertainty over US tariff policy. Economic momentum slowed in the first quarter as rising energy costs and price volatility added to inflationary pressures, complicating Lam’s push for double-digit growth.

The government has tapped its emergency fund and frozen some taxes on fuel to stabilize prices and shore up domestic supplies. Vietnamese airlines have slashed flights for April over rising fuel costs and shortage concerns.

The export-reliant nation is also under renewed US scrutiny from newly launched Section 301 investigations into alleged excess manufacturing capacity and a broader probe into forced labor. That creates more uncertainty for companies whose shipments to the US make up around 30% of the country’s GDP.

A former police officer, Lam rose through the public security ministry to eventually become minister, where he was the primary enforcer of a sweeping anti-corruption campaign that netted everyone from presidents to deputy prime ministers and tycoons.

Since taking over as party chief in August 2024 after the death of his predecessor, Lam has sped through a clutch of reforms, shrinking the number of provinces by half and cutting a whole tier of local government. The promise is to make doing business easier and faster, but the changes have also caused delays and confusion given the haste with which they’ve been rolled out.

The new prime minister is expected to be announced later Tuesday, while the next central bank governor is set to be confirmed on Wednesday. The current governor, Nguyen Thi Hong, has been elected deputy chairwoman of parliament for the upcoming term.