Vietnam’s president quits after one year on the job amid signs of political turmoil

The Vietnamese Communist Party on Wednesday accepted the resignation of President Vo Van Thuong, the government said in a statement citing “shortcomings”, in a sign of political turmoil that could hurt foreign investors’ confidence in the country.

The government said in a statement that Thuong violated party rules, adding that those “shortcomings had negatively impacted public opinion, affecting the reputation of the party, state and him personally”.

The Central Party Committee, a top decision-making body in Communist Party-ruled Vietnam, approved Thuong’s resignation just about a year after his election.

The president holds a largely ceremonial role, but is one of the top four political positions in the Southeast Asian nation.

The committee’s meeting preceded an extraordinary session of Vietnam’s rubber-stamping parliament scheduled on Thursday, when deputies are expected to confirm the party’s decisions.

Major leadership changes in the one-party state have recently been all linked to the wide-ranging “blazing furnace” anti-bribery campaign, which is aimed at stamping out widespread corruption, but is also suspected by critics to be a tool for political infighting.

Thuong, 53, quit days after Vietnamese police announced the arrest for alleged corruption a decade ago of a former head of central Vietnam’s Quang Ngai province, who served while Thuong was party chief there.

Thuong was widely regarded as being close to General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, Vietnam’s most powerful figure and the main architect of the anti-corruption campaign.

Last year, when former president Nguyen Xuan Phuc quit after the party blamed him for “violations and wrongdoing” by officials under his control, it took one month and a half for lawmakers to