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Asian AngleWho is Vietnam’s new Prime Minister Le Minh Hung?
The ex-central banker has the credentials to succeed. Whether he has the political capital remains to be seen
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On Tuesday, Vietnam’s National Assembly elected a new prime minister. For once, the appointment looks less like a factional compromise than a deliberate bet on competence. Le Minh Hung, born in 1970, is the country’s youngest prime minister since 1955. In a system that often prizes seniority, that alone is striking.
More striking still is Hung’s profile: he is not a provincial baron or a deal maker forged in the rough-and-tumble of local politics. Hung is a technocrat with economic training in Japan and is best known for his years at the State Bank of Vietnam, where he rose to become its youngest-ever governor. His profile suits an economy entering a harder phase of development, but he must now navigate a concentrated power structure at home and a volatile world, with less political capital than any recent predecessor.
Hung’s technocratic credentials are real. As central bank governor from 2016 to late 2020, he helped stabilise Vietnam’s macroeconomic foundations, build sizeable foreign reserves and nudge its banking sector towards digital modernisation. He is not a flamboyant politician, rarely speaking to the media, but a steward who understands that keeping the machinery running matters more than announcing grand redesigns.
However, his record as central banker is not unblemished. The Van Thinh Phat fraud case, one of the largest financial scandals in Vietnamese history, germinated on his watch, raising questions about supervisory rigour even as his macroeconomic management drew praise.
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