Nguyen Phu Trong, general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam and the country's most powerful politician, has died at the age of 80 after months of illness, official media report.
“General Secretary of the Party Central Committee Nguyen Phu Trong died of old age and serious illness at the 108th Central Military Hospital at 1:38 p.m. on July 19, 2024,” the Nhan Dan newspaper reported.
Trong has dominated Vietnamese politics since 2011, when he was elected party leader.
During his term in office, he worked to consolidate the power of the Communist Party in Vietnam's one-party system.
In the ten years before he took over the top position in Vietnamese politics, the balance of power had shifted more towards the government wing led by then Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung.
Born in Hanoi in 1944, Trong was a Marxist-Leninist ideologist who earned a degree in philosophy before joining the Communist Party at the age of 22.
He viewed corruption as the greatest threat to the party's legitimacy.
“A country without discipline would be chaotic and unstable,” Trong said in 2016 after he was re-elected to lead the party.
Officially, there is no supreme leader in Vietnam, but the head of the Communist Party is traditionally considered the most powerful.
He launched a comprehensive campaign against corruption that became known as the “red hot furnace” and roiled both the economic and political elite.
Since 2016, thousands of party officials have been subjected to disciplinary measures, including former presidents Nguyen Xuan Phuc and Vo Van Thuong, as well as former parliamentary speaker Vuong Dinh Hue.
In total, eight members of the powerful Politburo were removed from office due to corruption allegations; between 1986 and 2016, this did not happen in a single case.
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 country pursued a pragmatic policy of “bamboo diplomacy”. He used this term to describe the flexibility of the nuclear power plant, which bends but does not break in the changing headwinds of geopolitics.
Vietnam has maintained its traditional relations with its much larger neighbor China, despite disagreements over sovereignty in the South China Sea.
But the country also moved closer to the United States and elevated its relations with its former wartime enemy Vietnam to the highest diplomatic status: a comprehensive strategic partnership.