Vietnam’s long-serving leader Nguyen Phu Trong dies at 80

Nguyen Phu Trong, general secretary of Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party and the country’s most powerful politician, has died following months of ill health, official media has said. He was 80.

“General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party Nguyen Phu Trong passed away on July 19, 2024, at the 108 Central Military Hospital due to old age and serious illness,” the Nhan Dan newspaper said on Friday.

Official media said a state funeral would be held.

Trong has dominated Vietnamese politics since 2011, when he was elected party chief. During his tenure, he worked to consolidate the Communist Party’s power in Vietnam’s single-party political system.

In the decade before he took the top role in Vietnamese politics, the balance of power had shifted more toward the governmental wing led by then-Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung.

Born in 1944 in Hanoi, Trong was a Marxist-Leninist ideologue who earned a degree in philosophy before becoming a member of the Communist Party at the age of 22.

He viewed corruption as the single gravest threat to maintaining the party’s legitimacy.

“A country without discipline would be chaotic and unstable,” Trong said in 2016 after being re-elected to the party’s helm.

Officially, Vietnam has no top leader, but the Communist Party chief is traditionally seen as the most powerful.

Blazing furnace, bamboo diplomacy

He launched a sweeping anti-corruption campaign known as the “blazing furnace” that singed both business and political elites.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was “saddened” by Trong's death and called him “a pivotal figure in Vietnam’s recent history,” UN deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said.

During Trong's tenure as president and Communist Party chief, Guterres said, “Vietnam continued its remarkable development journey to emerge as one of the world’s fastest-growing economies and an important partner for the United Nations," the spokesman said.

Trong studied in the Soviet Union from 1981 to 1983, and there was speculation that under his leadership, Vietnam would move closer to Russia and China.

However, the Southeast Asian nation followed a pragmatic policy of “bamboo diplomacy,” a phrase he coined that referred to the plant’s flexibility, bending but not breaking in the shifting headwinds of geopolitics.

The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party offered its condolences to the Vietnamese people.

US President Joe Biden issued a statement mourning Trong's death.

He called Trong “a champion of the deep ties between the American and Vietnamese people whose leadership helped nurture the friendship and partnership our countries enjoy today.”