Vietnam’s President, Vo Van Thuong, has resigned after only a year in office.
The Vietnamese Communist Party accepted President Vo Van Thuong’s resignation, the administration announced on Wednesday, March 20.
The government stated in a statement that Thuong had broken party norms and that these “shortcomings had negatively impacted public opinion, affecting the reputation of the Party, State, and him personally”.
Thuong’s resignation was approved by the Central Party Committee, a senior decision-making body in Communist-ruled Vietnam, less than a year after his election.
The president’s job is mostly ceremonial, but it is one of the top four political offices in the Southeast Asian country.
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The committee’s meeting came ahead of an unusual session of Vietnam’s rubber-stamping parliament set for Thursday when lawmakers are anticipated to endorse the party’s choices.
The official statement did not go into detail about Thuong’s faults, but major leadership changes in the one-party state have recently been tied to a broad anti-bribery effort. Its goal is to combat systemic corruption, but critics believe it will also be used for political infighting.
Foreign companies and diplomats have regularly criticised the campaign for dragging down decision-making in a country already plagued by bureaucracy.
Thuong, 53, resigned days after Vietnamese authorities reported the arrest of a former head of central Vietnam’s Quang Ngai province for alleged wrongdoing a decade ago. Thuong was the party chief at the time.
He was also a prominent party official in the economic capital of Ho Chi Minh City, which has been rocked by a multibillion-dollar long-running financial scandal that is currently being prosecuted.
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