To Lam is Institutionalising Politics Again

When To Lam assumed Vietnam’s top job in August 2024, seasoned observers braced for the worst. The former public security minister had orchestrated much of the “Blazing Furnace” anti-corruption campaign that affected political rivals and shattered the Communist Party of Vietnam’s (CPV) carefully calibrated power-sharing arrangements. His predecessor, Nguyen Phu Trong, had already brought the system to breaking point with an unprecedented third term as general secretary. Few expected the new strongman to rebuild the very institutions he had helped dismantle.

Yet 14 months into his tenure, To Lam appears to be re-institutionalising Vietnamese politics.

He is starting from the very top. In early September, the Politburo of the CPV issued Regulation 365, elevating the permanent member of the Secretariat to the “core leader” tier — alongside the general secretary, president, prime minister and National Assembly chair. The permanent member, who is the party’s fifth-most senior leader, handles daily operations and is considered its deputy general secretary. The move widens the inner circle, creating a frequent-meeting cohort akin to the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo Standing Committee. A larger core is harder for any single figure to dominate, at least on paper.

The same instinct appears in the impending rearrangement of the Central Committee (CC) and the Politburo, the two supreme political bodies in Vietnam’s one-party state. Because seats are often tied to the number of provinces, ministerial-level agencies and central party commissions, To Lam had a ready argument to “streamline” these institutions to fit a state machinery which has seen a reduction in the number of state-related entities. Yet even as sweeping reforms halve the number of provinces and pare back ministries and party organs, the sizes of the CC (about roughly 200 members) and the Politburo (17 to 19 members) are expected to hold steady. That preserves two anchors of Vietnam’s intra-elite bargaining and helps keep collective leadership intact; again, this is on paper.

To Lam has been more decisive in professionalising the bureaucracy. First, he has forcefully implemented a non-local provincial leadership policy to tackle the long-running problem of local entrenchment. Previous attempts fell short: even at the height of the “Blazing Furnace,” about a third of provincial party chiefs remained home-grown. The state-slimming drive has given To Lam the opportunity — and leverage — to insist on genuine rotation. By October 2025, he declared victory on this initiative.

Second, as a pragmatist, he wants more results and fewer reports when gauging performance. Hence Regulation 366, which is a detailed, 100-plus-page rulebook that applies a point-based evaluation system to the Party’s senior echelons. KPIs are not new to Vietnam’s millions of public officials; the novelty is that the top brass are now subject to them, too. In theory, transparent criteria can make promotions less about proximity to the top leader and more about performance, and can clarify expectations in a system that has often preferred flexible ambiguity.

None of this is trivial. Enlarging the core leadership, insulating the CC and Politburo from headcount shocks, rotating provincial bosses and scoring senior leaders are moves that tug Vietnamese politics back toward rules over relationships. But success hinges on three tests.

… if the KPI regime is relegated to box-ticking, if rotation simply swaps one network for another, or if central appointments stifle initiative, the state will grow more centralised without becoming more capable.

The first is intent versus incentive. Anti-localism can morph into selective centralism. If rotation disproportionately advances officials with links to To Lam’s home turf or the Ministry of Public Security, the project will look less like a Weberian turn and more like cultivating a new set of loyalists. Vietnam has seen this before. General Secretary Le Kha Phieu championed anti-corruption from 1997 to 2001 while filling key posts with fellow Thanh Hoa natives — a pattern that contributed to his eventual ouster. If other factions regard To Lam’s reforms as threatening their influence without offering compensating advantages, resistance will be fierce. Early results from recent provincial party congresses are mixed: while several figures linked to To Lam secured party secretary posts — Vu Hong Van in Dong Nai, Quan Minh Cuong in Cao Bang, and Nguyen Hong Thai in Bac Ninh — other factions, notably the military, have also advanced, with four party secretaries drawn from career officers.

The second test concerns the breadth of coalitions. Building an impartial bureaucracy requires buy-in from more than one power centre. Vietnam’s party-state is a negotiated order; localism endures because it serves multiple interests, not just provincial ones. Rotation can curb hometown capture, but without parallel incentives — predictable careers, credible performance rewards and meaningful protection from arbitrary discipline — officials will find new ways to re-embed old networks.

The third test pertains to the issue of means versus ends. Re-institutionalisation imposed by fiat can corrode the very collective leadership it seeks to restore. Consider the recent saga in Thanh Hoa, one of Vietnam’s largest and most notoriously insular provinces. In recent months, the centrally appointed police chief, To Anh Dung, led an unprecedented sweep with more than 1,000 arrests, including nearly all top provincial officials. Their replacements arrived not through local party processes but by direct assignment from Hanoi. The operation may have broken Thanh Hoa’s legendary localism, but the method speaks volumes. Replacing the entire provincial leadership slates from the centre may tidy the chessboard, but it narrows space for the real intra-party democracy that To Lam envisions.

Vietnam wants faster decisions on big projects, fewer veto points for narrow interests, and a rules-first culture that reassures investors and businesses. A more stable, merit-based bureaucracy could help. But if the KPI regime is relegated to box-ticking, if rotation simply swaps one network for another, or if central appointments stifle initiative, the state will grow more centralised without becoming more capable.

To Lam’s early moves suggest he has absorbed a hard lesson of the past decade that norms, once bent, do not spring back on their own. They must be rebuilt — and sometimes redesigned. Expanding the core leadership, protecting the CC’s role, rotating provincial chiefs and grading senior performance are sensible steps toward that end. The obvious risk, however, is that re-institutionalisation becomes a new instrument of personalised power rather than a check. To Lam has shown he can impose constraints on the system; the harder task may be to impose them on himself.

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