Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
DRV
Political Parties in the DRV National Assembly53
October 28, 1946
| Independents | 90 |
| Democratic | 45 |
| Socialist | 24 |
| Marxist | 15 |
| Lien Viet | 80 |
| Dong Minh Hoi | 17 |
| VNQDD | 20 |
| 291 |
The VNQDD and the Dong Minh Hoi, allocated 50 and 20 seats respectively, were thus less than 50% represented, and the Marxists group, the smallest in the Assembly, was, according to all surviving evidence, the most active and influential. During the two weeks the Assembly was in session, a number of opposition members were arrested and charged with criminal offenses. When the Assembly closed, 20 Dong Minh Hoi and VNQDD members remained, and of these, only 2 registered dissenting votes.
The new constitution, ratified on 8 November 1946 by the National Assembly with a vote of 240 to 2, ordained in phrases reminiscent of Jefferson and Rousseau a state of guaranteed civic freedoms, of delineated duties and rights of citizens, and of a people's parliament supreme in power. Thereafter, the Assembly adjourned until late 1953, and never did get around to transforming itself into constitutionally prescribed form.54 The 1946 Constitution declared Vietnam to be a democratic republic in which all power belonged to the people "without distinction of race, class, creed, wealth, or sex." Its territory, "composed of Bac-Bo, or Northern Viet Nam (Tonkin), Trung-Bo or Central Viet Nam (Annam), and Nam-Bo or Southern Viet Nam (Cochinchina) is one and indivisible... The capital of Viet Nam is Hanoi."55 However, the Constitution of 1946 never became institutionalized; instead, the exigencies of the war with the French eventuated in a government which was literally an administrative extension of a rigidly disciplined politico-military apparatus headed by Ho Chi Minh, and a cadre of his old comrades from the Indochina Communist Party.56
The government approved by the National Assembly on 3 November 1946, however, preserved some of the facade of coalition; although the key cabinet positions were filled by communists, the government included independents, democrats, socialists and even one nominal VNQDD. Figure 5 presents the several Vietnamese governments in the period 1945–1949. Ho Chi Minh throughout that period preserved coalition, at least pro forma; the DRV government in 1949 was still composed of a minority of ICP members and included one VNQDD and one Dong Minh Hoi. (The chart ignores the Lien Viet, using the more familiar Viet Minh throughout; the Vietnamese Nationalist Party is the VNQDD.)
