Transparency, Theater, and Duplicity in Việt Nam’s General Elections

The Communist Party of Việt Nam (CPV) excels at staging spectacular administrative productions. 

For weeks, state media outlets have described the recently concluded March 15 general elections as a “national festival” and a triumph of the people’s will, boasting an almost comical 99.64% voter turnout. 

This stunning display of civic engagement, however, completely ignores the fact that the Vietnamese voting public is heavily pressured—and practically mandated—to participate in a process where outcomes were decided months in advance.

The Vietnamese government persistently claims that its election system is a democratic exercise in absolute transparency where voters get to choose “outstanding representatives.” However, a closer examination reveals a glaring duplicity. 

Although ballots were cast on March 15, the public will not see the official results until March 21. National Assembly Vice Chairman Nguyễn Đức Hải stated that preliminary results must first be updated internally to the Politburo and the Secretariat of the Communist Party. 

Only after the highest decision-making bodies of the party have scrutinized the tallies will the information be released to the nearly 79 million eligible voters.

This delay is part of a deeply controlled system where the election is less about public choice and more about the rigorous vetting process orchestrated by the party-aligned Fatherland Front.

Out of the 864 candidates who ran for the 500 National Assembly seats this year, an overwhelming majority were pre-screened party loyalists, with only 64 candidates not holding official party membership. 

Consequently, voters face lists of absolute strangers who only bring superficial biographies and generic action plans to the table.

Public apathy about the elections is also rampant, and citizens are understandably far more invested in other issues, such as the surging uncontrolled gas prices and the Iran war, than in a predetermined legislative roster.

A Model of Duplicity

In recent years, Hà Nội has dispatched delegations to monitor heavily criticized, sham elections in Myanmar and Russia, dutifully praising them as “successful” and “well-conducted.” 

However, oversight within Việt Nam is left exclusively to the CPV. The entities responsible for overseeing the vote—the National Election Council, the Standing Committee of the National Assembly, and the Fatherland Front—are the exact same bodies responsible for organizing it.

Simultaneously playing the game while acting as the referee neutralizes any concept of independent, unbiased accountability.

This duplicity can be found everywhere in Việt Nam’s governance model and extends beyond the bounds of elections; the communist regime relentlessly champions human rights and democratic freedoms internationally while systematically dismantling them at home.

For instance, the state claims that citizens have the “right to mastery,” (quyền làm chủ) yet heavily penalizes deviation from the official narrative.

Leading up to the election, police across several provinces levied hefty administrative fines against citizens for allegedly “insulting” or “distorting” information about National Assembly candidates online, utilizing Decree 15/2020.

Duplicity in Digital Privacy and Religious Freedom

While public dissent is heavily penalized, the state reaches just as aggressively into the private sphere, completely shattering any illusion of digital privacy.

The Supreme People’s Procuracy recently issued guidance confirming that police can legally access mobile phones, personal computers, and private messages on applications like Zalo and Telegram during criminal investigations, overriding constitutional guarantees of correspondence secrecy. 

Under the guise of national security, the state tramples over citizens’ private digital lives. People are free to speak, as long as they only say what the state wants to hear—and they will check your encrypted messages to ensure compliance.

This two-faced governance is equally glaring in religious freedom. Despite constitutional guarantees and state media highlighting government-sanctioned festivals as proof of an open society, the reality is relentless suppression. 

Unregistered religious minority groups—including independent Buddhist factions, Protestant Montagnards in the Central Highlands, and Hòa Hảo Buddhists—face continuous harassment, surveillance, and arbitrary arrest. 

The government’s definition of religious freedom is also strictly limited to state-approved organizations operating under its explicit directives.

Anyone practicing outside this tightly controlled perimeter is swiftly criminalized and deemed a threat to the established political order.

An Architecture of Contradictions

The CPV has built a sophisticated architecture of contradictions. It preaches transparency while hiding election results behind closed doors for a week. It demands public participation while pre-selecting every viable candidate. It boasts of human rights while silencing journalists and monitoring text messages, and it advertises religious freedom while imprisoning minority believers. 

Hence, the March 2026 elections serve as the pinnacle of this duplicity and as a metric of the Communist Party’s administrative control. When the new parliament convenes in April, it will possess no genuine mandate to enact dynamic new policies.

Instead, its sole purpose will be to formally appoint officials to top leadership positions, including the presidency and prime minister, which were already finalized during the 14th National Party Congress in January.

Until there is genuine, independent oversight and a willingness to actually allow political competition, Việt Nam’s “national festival” will remain exactly what it is: a mandatory, state-sponsored performance where the public is merely an involuntary audience to its own subjugation.