The National Assembly (NA) of Vietnam recently summoned its extraordinary 9th session to try to clean up the bottlenecks of institutional strangles and to open the way for the new leader of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) to LAM has described as the “new era of the national ascent”.
Since the start of the current term in power in May 2021, the NA has met for eight regular sessions, as prescribed by the Vietnamese Constitution. The main objective of the special session convened from February 12 to 19 was to promulgate the decisions of the CPV and Politburo Central Committee under the direction of LAM. Many of them limit the powers of the NA itself, reversing the measures that the party had taken to empower the NA as political control of decisions of national importance.
In the service of the LAM restructuring and administrative rationalization program, the NA has approved the merging laws and eliminating a number of year’s committees and eliminating permanent members and full -time members from these committees. The Foreign Affairs Committee was abolished, the Economic Committee was merged into the Finance and Budget Committee, the Judicial Committee was merged into the Law Committee and the Social Affairs Committee was merged into the Culture and Education Committee. Many of these committees were created after the secretary general now deceased Nguyen Phu Trong, the predecessor of LAM, assumed the office of the President of the NA in 2006. In January of this year, the Institute of Legislative Studies, founded by Trong itself in 2008, as an initiative to allow the NA, was also dismissed.
These movements are widely considered as monitoring the political disappearance of Vuong Dinh Hue, which was moved as president of the NA in May 2024 as part of the country’s anti-corruption campaign. Over the past two years, two other high -ranking officials of the year have also been removed from his functions after being disciplined by the Politburo: the secretary general of the NA Bui Van Cuong and Nguyen Phu Cuong, President of the NA Committee on finance and the budget. With the dissolution of the Na Committee for Foreign Affairs, its president has been reduced to a full -time party manager at NA and is no longer in the development of foreign policies.
Most importantly, the agency down Na in national decision -making is in good place in the amendments to the law on legislation, officially known as the law on the promulgation of normative legal documents. The development of this law over the past two decades has seen the NA and its committees assume an important role in the legislative process, in particular in the two most recent versions of the law written in 2008 and 2015, which were supervised by Trong as president of the NA and party leader, respectively.
The changes in the law overthrow the previous efforts, in particular those integrated in the 2015 version, to give the committees and deputies of the year by orienting more agency in the staging of legislative development and the more strict surveillance power on the government. The newly adopted law refers many of the powers of the legislative process to give the government a more free hand in the formulation and execution of policies. As recently said by the Na, Tran Thanh Man president:
It is imperative to in -depth reform the mentality and the approach of the legislature. Legal documents must be concise, clear and regulate only questions in the competence of the National Assembly; Decentralization and the delegation of authority to government should be reinforced. The laws should limit the codification of the detailed content under the authority of the government, rather providing a general framework to ensure the flexibility of management and administration.
The NA is now back to its old role to only make laws on the general framework, which was strongly criticized decades ago. As such, government decrees and ministerial circulars have greater weight in the development of policies and implementation. Even if 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 state based on the law. However, with these new movements, the rule by decree, which gives vast discretionary powers to the government and its ministries, is back in force.
Among the different results of the owed me The reforms that started in the late 1980s were the quiet infiltration of a state -based state section and the role of the National Assembly in Vietnam policy. However, it was only during the election of the President of NA, Nong Duc Manh, as secretary general of the CPV in April 2001 and the acquisition of Nguyen Van An as president of the NA that the prominence of the Legislative Assembly began to increase considerably. Before that, the NA had operated mainly as a rubber stump in the national decision -making process. Nguyen Van An has introduced some reforms, allowing the live broadcasting of the questions and responses of the year’s deputies and responses to increase transparency and improve the NA monitoring powers.
The reforms starting in the early 2000s and accelerating after resolution 48 of Politburo on the development of the legal system in 2005, allowed the NA to play a more dynamic role in the development of Vietnamese policies, rather than simply ratifying the decisions of the CPV Central Committee and Politburo. The basis of the NA reforms was to increase the proportion of full -time deputies in the legislative assembly by 500 members and professionalize the operations of the NA committees. There has been a constant increase in the number of full -time deputies in recent decades. Before 2000, only about 5% of Na members were full time. After the 2002 NA election, the number had reached 24% and reached a record of almost 40% in the current mandate from 2021. The designated structure of the CPV Central Committee also attributes seats to all members of the NA NA committee. It has become a common practice that two members of Politburo would be taken from the NA. With the rise of NA in the structure of power, the direction of the “trio” of the secretary general, the president of the State and the Prime Minister of the CPV was transformed into a “four pillars” model, the president of the NA being now considered one of the main leaders of the party state.
As part of this system, NA deputies were authorized to question the performance of the ministers and even of the Prime Minister. For example, the deputies of Na Nguyen Minh Thuyet and Duong Trung Quoc were daring enough to suggest the resignation of Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung during live grilled sessions in Vietnam, recognized the role of the NA of Vietnam as evolution in a darling system, he had gradually gained more influence, in particular political debate, surveillance and responsibility. Supervised by Trong, the NA was able to reject government proposals to build megaprojects, including the North -South North -South rail link in 2010 and the nuclear energy program in 2016 – which have both been relaunched by the government in recent months.
Over the years, however, the critical voices of the NA have been marginalized or silenced. Luu Binh Nhuong and Thanh Van are two of the most frank criticisms of the NA, whose arrests and subsequent trials earlier this year have symbolically marked the end of the Na ascendant.
The party recently tightened its control over the policies’ development space, reducing the capacity of the National Assembly to challenge executive decisions. Now that decision -making has moved to political institutions and managed by the CPV and that the executive branch of the State has taken greater control over the implementation of policies, the NA will note that its reduced influence.
The selection of the most recent staff in 2021 presented a stronger control of the parties on the selection of candidates. There was a sharp drop in seats won by independent and non -supporter candidates; Consequently, the NA is dominated by the members of the party who line up with the leadership. Critical voices have been marginalized; Internal debate and surveillance are much less vigorous, and recent restrictions on media coverage and stricter control over online discussion have made more difficult for citizens to engage in parliamentary debates. A more reactive and instrumentalist NA is now considered crucial to take off the hands of the government so that it can throw the way to the “new era of the national rise” of Vietnam.