Independent candidates underscore NA election

The onus is on candidates to reflect the nation’s differing viewpoints

In order to achieve this goal, the people must have more chances to select their ideal representatives through allowing the participation of more qualified candidates from different groups of the society, said Nguyen Si Dung, the Vietnam National Assembly Office’s Vice Chairman.
The onus is also on elected members, regardless of their background, to accept they are representatives for the whole nation, not just for individual regions or groups of interest.
“Improving the representative role is currently one of the major challenges for the National Assembly delegates as they must build capability to thoroughly understand the wishes and real interests of their diversified voters.
“If the representatives fail to learn their voters’ wishes and interests, they will be unable to reflect them through making laws or building policies,” Dung told Vietnam Investment Review.
One solution is to increase the number of full-time National Assembly delegates, who will be able to canvass voters’ feelings and to reduce the number of executive National Assembly members.
John Hendra, the UN resident coordinator in Vietnam, a close partner in supporting National Assembly capacity building, stressed: “An increased proportion of full-time deputies will not only help reduce conflicts of interest, thereby promoting transparency and accountability in the work of the National Assembly, but is also a precondition for a more professional performance of
individual parliament members.”
“The very mandate of a people’s representative requires a clear separation with the functions of the executive and/or the judiciary. We, therefore, support the move towards reducing the number of deputies who also concurrently hold executive posts/functions,” he added.

Dung said there remained a conflict in the current National Assembly delegate structure, where more than a half of executive officials having seats in the National Assembly.

“Executive and administrative officials must not have a place in the National Assembly as their monitoring role is entirely limited. Those delegates cannot in fact monitor or make an inquiry to the operation of their boss in the governmental offices. This will cause a conflict in the interests of themselves. They will, therefore, be unable to practice a real representative and monitoring role in this mechanism,” Dung said.