So I finally picked up
this TL idea again! (You may have noticed I find mapping elections in countries that don't really hold them interesting
)
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The Vietnamese House of Representatives, the legislature of South Vietnam, is like many aspects of South Vietnam’s politics modelled on the United States. It’s elected every two years, since the ‘Bi-Vietnamese reforms’ of 1986 has had legislative powers separate from the Presidency, and on a more negative side has significant amounts of malapportionment and a fair bit of gerrymandering going on. Provinces are assigned a certain number of seats they have to draw up, but it’s up to each province’s government as to how they do this, with an emphasis on trying not to make them too unequal but fairly limited redistricting powers except every fifth year of a decade when the whole map is redrawn.
The chamber is set to be elected again this September, but was last elected in September 2019, and was presented by both the press and the opposition parties as a referendum on President Phêrô Nguyễn Văn Hùng (who is seeking re-election next year). It’s consequently a good example of the rather convoluted state of South Vietnamese politics as of late.
Hùng’s party, the
Social Democratic Alliance (SDA), are part of that strange family of parties that have precisely zero connection to the ideology from which they derive their name, like the Social Democrats in Portugal or Brazil and the Liberals in Australia. For much of the time from the beginning of the democratic South until the watershed 2015 midterms, the SDA was the more moderate of the two parties, but in a centrist way more than a right-wing one. However, the swing of the opposition towards right-wing populism drove President Thanh Hải Ngô towards the right for the last two years of his presidency, and Hùng has followed suit to some degree. Its voter support has also shifted from the traditional ‘party of government’-style monolithic support from local patronage networks in rural areas to being predominantly in the central part of the country, particularly with the VNQDD establishing a chokehold on the country’s south. The party remains pretty aloof with regards to social liberalization and international trade, with probably the biggest impact of Hùng’s presidency being the country establishing closer ties to the Vatican (which is not surprising given Hùng’s Catholicism). On a more unfortunate note, Hùng has disappointed many of the religious supporters who backed him in 2017 for his work to fight child trafficking by doing fairly little to speak out about child abuse in the priesthood, which is suspected to be a decision he has made to avoid upsetting church leaders.
The
Nationalist (VNQDD) party has changed much more radically. It acted as the main opposition party during the pre-reform period, and eventually became the vehicle for Nguyễn Đan Quế’s successful presidential runs in 1991, 1995 and 1999. Under Quế and until the scandals surrounding the 2013 election it proved the more radical party both in terms of softening the authoritarianism of South Vietnam’s political climate, creating a more stable welfare state and opening up the economy to globalization (which made it very popular in the Saigon area until its recent shift). With the ascent of Van Tran to its leadership in 2013, though, it’s transformed from what in Western terms we’d call a syncretic party to a right-wing populist one, and by appealing to older and more hawkish South Vietnamese wary of the consequences of globalization it’s managed to win three consecutive majorities in the House. Their main regions of strength are the north (where tensions with North Vietnam on the border have been extremely fertile ground for Tran’s version of the party) and the Mekong River Delta.
You might be wondering, if the right of the party kicked out the left, what happened to them? Well, with figures like former opposition leader Batong Vu Pham and 2012 presidential candidate Antôny Lâm (and more generally the centre-left in South Vietnam) still very much having a support base and areas of the country like Saigon being deeply disillusioned with the nationalist turn of the VNQDD, they formed the
Socialist (CNXH) party, which is a fairly mainstream centre-left party. In 2019 they significantly bolstered their seat count thanks to a strong grassroots campaign in the Central Highlands and inner-city Saigon where poverty rates have been on the rise since the late 1990s, though not surprisingly their strongest seat is Pham’s in Bà Rịa.
The smallest of the four major parties after the 2019 election, as well as one of the most unusual, is the
Personalist Party. The Personalists’ ideology is based on the theoretical underpinning of Ngô Đình Diệm’s rule, Personal Diginity Theory, a form of Christian democracy which advocates for a third way between capitalism and communism that is based on community good as opposed to materialist ideas of production. The difference between the Personalists of modern South Vietnam and Diệm is that the modern Personalists actually mean it to some degree. As one might guess, they used to be monolithically strong among Vietnamese Christians, but the Catholicism of Hùng’s SDA and the CNXH giving Christian socialists other options have finally started to wear that away. Nevertheless, they retain a solid hold on areas like Diệm’s former base of government in the colonial era, Bình Thuận, and in Biên Hòa, the country’s third-largest city and the home of its current leader Ánh Quang Cao. They also managed a shock victory in Quảng Trị ‘s 1st district, the most northerly in the country, where Father Thadeus Nguyễn Văn Lý unseated the VNQDD incumbent against the national trend.
As widely expected, the VNQDD won an increased House majority, but it wasn’t particularly sizeable compared to the near two-thirds landslide Tran won in 2015. This was largely down to the party actually declining in Saigon and, as mentioned, suffering a fair number of defeats to CNXH candidates in deprived areas. In fact, the CNXH made almost as many gains as the VNQDD thanks to protest votes against the government in two different directions.
The distortive effect of FPTP in the 2019 election is also quite significant, with the VNQDD obviously overrepresented (taking over half the seats on 36,8% of the popular vote) and the CNXH severely underrepresented (getting one fifteenth of the seats on 19,1% of the popular vote). Ironically, despite its patronage network connections, the SDA’s 30,2% of the vote and 104 seats are probably the most proportional in the House.
Less than 6 months after its election, the 2019 House had to deal with the utterly devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the fairly successful response of the North contrasted with the South’s severe healthcare and poorer implementation of precautions like mask-wearing and social distancing have been a major embarrassment to the country. One might assume that this means Hùng will be in real danger in the 2022 presidential election, but thanks to the divisions in the opposition, the opposite appears to be true; much as he is unpopular, voters are even more hostile to House Speaker Van Tran becoming President, seeing him as a dangerous right-wing extremist, and while the CNXH and Personalists have formed a united ticket with Antôny Lâm as their nominee, he is still a figure of controversy for his 2012 campaign and is anathema to the VNQDD base.