Scores of grass-roots party leaders get the boot in 'democracy' drive
Forty-six local political leaders have been removed from office in Vietnam in the past year after failing to win a confidence vote from their constituents as the communist government seeks to boost 'grass-roots democracy'.
The unprecedented scheme, being carried out in more than 4,000 neighbourhood-level government bodies across the country, is one of several recent initiatives aimed at improving governance at the local level, where officials are notoriously corrupt.
'This is a large measure of democratisation because it places a significant amount of power to decide on the future of office-holders in the hands of people outside the [communist] party machinery,' said David Koh, a specialist on Vietnam, based at Singapore's Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
The scheme is now being applied only to the chairpeople of the most local tier of government - people's committees and councils at the ward level.
Voters must be members of the Fatherland Front, a broad-based coalition with ties to the communist party. And the incumbents have won near-unanimous votes of approval in the majority of wards.
'Those chairmen who have been removed were all found to have broken [corruption-related] laws,' said Tran Ngoc Nhan, head of the Law and Democracy department at the national Fatherland Front headquarters in Hanoi.
Such results lead Martin Painter, a Vietnam analyst at the City University of Hong Kong, to believe that reining in corruption is a more important objective of the scheme than boosting democracy.
'All of this is not about democracy but about improving state performance and legitimacy. That it accords so well with bits of doctrine about the socialist view of democracy is important, but secondary,' Mr Painter said.
Even the state-controlled Vietnamese media has raised doubts about how voting was carried out.
'Those [chairpeople] who are committed to their work and adhere to regulations may be hurt by the confidence vote, while lax leaders who know how to lubricate relationships manage to win large votes,' said a recent article in Thanh Nien newspaper.
Ordinary Vietnamese have taken little notice of the initiative.
Most are not entitled to vote and are inclined to dismiss it as having more form than substance.
Nevertheless, observers say there was an unusual degree of blunt public discussion of leaders' performance at meetings held as part of the process.
The meetings included locals not permitted to vote.
