HANOI: Vietnam's top communist leader Nguyen Phu Trong was re-elected Wednesday in a victory for the party's old guard which some fear could slow crucial economic reforms in the fast-growing country.
Factional fighting overshadowed a week of closed-door talks at the five-yearly Communist Party Congress. But Trong, 72, retained his position while his rival -- reformist Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung -- was pushed from power.
Dung remains prime minister but will step down later this year when the National Assembly convenes to appoint a replacement.
This is expected to be Nguyen Xuan Phuc, currently a deputy prime minister, state media said.
"Delegates to the first meeting of the party's central committee congratulated Comrade Nguyen Phu Trong who was elected general secretary," the official Vietnam News Agency reported.
Trong, 72, seen as more of a conservative apparatchik and closer to China than Dung, has been party chief since 2011 and will stay on following a compromise deal which analysts say is a move back towards more consensus-based decision-making.
Dung, 66, a two-term prime minister and political heavyweight, is credited with pushing a pro-business agenda and talking tough to China over a festering maritime dispute.
He had been tipped to ascend to the party leader position but in the end he lost out in internal elections. He was not selected for the 180-member central committee, which in effect ends his official political career.
The charismatic Dung was a rare "political celebrity" amid the communist country's faceless collective leadership, Jonathan London, a Vietnam expert at City University of Hong Kong, told AFP, adding that this style alienated other cadres.
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