Chairman of the National Assembly of Vietnam in the context of "Trường Chinh"

Nguyễn Phú Trọng (Vietnamese: [ŋwiən˦ˀ˥ fu˧˦ t͡ɕawŋ͡m˧˨ʔ] new-yen foo chong; 14 April 1944 – 19 July 2024) was a Vietnamese politician and political theorist who served as general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam from 2011 until his death in 2024. As the head of the party's Secretariat, Politburo and Central Military Commission, Trọng was Vietnam's paramount leader. From 2018 to 2021, he also served concurrently as the tenth president of Vietnam.

A conservative Marxist–Leninist, Trọng joined the Communist Party of Vietnam in 1967 and rose through the section devoted to political work. He later joined the party's Central Committee in 1994, its Politburo in 1997 and Vietnam's National Assembly in 2002. Between 2000 and 2006, he was the Party Secretary for Hanoi, effectively the city's highest-ranking position. He served as Chairman of the National Assembly from 2006 to 2011.

The five pillars (Vietnamese: bộ ngũ, pronounced [tɨ˧˦ t͡ɕu˧˨ʔ]; or ngũ trụ), previously the four pillars (tứ trụ), is an informal term for the five most important party-state leaders in the Communist Party of Vietnam and the Government of Vietnam. In modern usage, the five pillars refer to the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, President of Vietnam, Prime Minister of Vietnam, Chairman of the National Assembly of Vietnam, and the Permanent Member of the Secretariat. Together, they are officially designated as the "Key Leaders of the Party and the State" (Vietnamese: Lãnh đạo chủ chốt của Đảng và Nhà nước) and can be considered as the de facto highest state leaders. Similar to China, there does not exist an official order of precedence for political leaders and rather they are inferred in a de facto fashion. However, since the chairmanship of the Communist Party was abolished, the General Secretary has been the highest ranking official in Vietnam. This division of power is formed to prevent dictatorial rule and preserve consensus-based leadership, which is officially called by the Vietnamese Communist Party as "democratic centralism". In 2025, the seat of Permanent Member of the Secretariat of CPV was designated as the fifth "key leader", virtually becoming the fifth pillar of the Vietnamese politics.

Unlike other communist states, the General Secretary of the party (or its predecessor) and the President of the state are largely occupied not by the same person, demonstrating the collective leadership in Vietnam. The only exceptions are: Hồ Chí Minh (1951–69), Trường Chinh (briefly in 1986), Nguyễn Phú Trọng (2018–21), and Tô Lâm (briefly in 2024), and except Hồ Chí Minh, all of those exceptions were practically elected to fulfill their successors' uncompleted terms of party general secretaryship or state presidency. Thus, the Party General Secretaries rarely hold offices that are nominally within the Vietnamese state apparatus and government except their parliament memberships, however is still managed to be the practical highest leader in the politics of Vietnam and is ideologically the highest commander of the People's Army of Vietnam, due to the ex officio occupation of the Secretaryship of the Party Central Military Commission.