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Edmund Malesky on Vietnam's Elections

Vietnam Communists Hold Election for National Assembly Involving One Party

05/22/2011
Jason Folkmanis, Bloomberg News

Vietnam’s Communist Party is holding elections for the country’s National Assembly today, a contest traditionally heralded as a symbol of openness without bringing policy changes in the one-party state.

Results in the vote last held in 2007, which may involve as many as 500 seats, will probably be available within a week, Pham Minh Tuyen, general secretary of the National Election Council, said by telephone. The Communist Party has ruled the country of 87 million people since it was reunified after the American-backed government of South Vietnam was defeated in a war in 1975.

“The Vietnamese government feels compelled to call their system democratic and to hold elections to try to tell the rest of the world that their version of democracy is just different from others,” Raymond Burghardt, a former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam and now director of seminars at the East-West Center in Honolulu, said in a telephone interview. “But the essence of this political system is that no alternative centers of power will be permitted to emerge.”

Included among the 827 contestants for positions as National Assembly deputies are 117 non-members of the Communist Party as well as 15 self-nominated candidates, according to a government election website.

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Edmund Malesky can comment on political development in Vietnam and China, as well as comparative political economy in Southeast Asia. He also can provide insight into the choices underlying the decisions of foreign investors and thereby the globalization debate, especially in regard to the discussion of "sweatshops" in developing countries.

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