Communist Vietnam Prepares for Assembly Elections

Officially, the National Assembly of Vietnam is the country's top decision making body. But in fact it is purely a rubber-stamp body. A majority of Assembly members belong to the country's only legal political party -- the Communist Party of Vietnam.

But this year, some independent candidates are hoping to get their foot in. Carl Thayer, a Vietnam expert at Australia's University of South Wales, said the elections would not mark any major changes but there would be "a slight rise in the number of non-party candidates standing and a marked rise in the number of independently-nominated candidates not going through the party system."

All the candidates competing in Sunday’s election have been through a pre-selection process. And they had to swear their allegiance to the country's founding ideological principles. It now remains to be seen how the electorate will respond to them.

Majority satisfied

"A vast majority of the Vietnamese are happy with the existing system and the regime is holding out because of the fear of disruption and chaos if the country moves to political pluralism and multi-party-democracy," Thayer said.

The small group of those advocating change in Vietnam have tended to be branded as dissidents. And recently the government has become more aggressive against its critics -- some twenty people have been arrested and detained because they urged an election boycott or called for a multi-party political system.

Brittis Edman, Amnesty International's researcher for human rights violations in South-East Asia, said they included trade-unionists, religious leaders and lawyers but that they did not pose a real threat to the current government.

"But I’m sure that the fact that they do operate, exist and are raising criticisms is perceived as a threat by the authorities," she explained. "Otherwise they wouldn’t stage this crackdown."

Economic boom is trump-card

However, the government's current trump-card is Vietnam's stunning economic growth. In East Asia, it is second only to China's. That’s why observers anticipate that voters on Sunday will elect to maintain the status quo. The Communist Party is expected to get 90 percent of the votes.

But nonetheless it will be interesting to follow how some of the independent candidates fair, say observers. As their success, or lack of it, will be used as a barometer to see how progressive forces are doing in one of the world’s few remaining Communist states.