Laos names veteran diplomat with international outlook to be new prime minister

BANGKOK (AP) — Laos has a new prime minister after the communist country’s National Assembly elected veteran diplomat Saleumxay Kommasith to the post, state-run media reported Tuesday.

Saleumxay, who turns 58 on Oct. 31, was elected on Monday in the Laotian capital Vientiane in a unanimous vote of 158 lawmakers who were present, the state news agency KPL said.

He is a member of the Politburo of the ruling Lao People’s Revolutionary Party and had previously served as deputy prime minister and foreign minister. Saleumxay succeeded Sonexay Siphandone, who in turn was elected the National Assembly president.

Saleumxay studied at Russia’s Moscow State Institute of International Relations and Australia’s Monash University before serving in a series of foreign ministry posts overseeing relations with Australia, the United States, the Americas, and Europe. He also served in the Lao Mission to the United Nations in New York and can speak English, Russian, and French.

His Western-oriented career is unusual for Laos, a small land-locked and impoverished country whose leaders generally have virtually no international profile aside from links with fraternal neighboring communist governments in Vietnam and China.

In a speech to the assembly after his election, Saleumxay said his government would give immediate attention to food production, infrastructure recovery, mineral management, major investment projects, tourism, revenue collection, and monetary stability, KPL reported.

A 2026 country report for Laos issued by Germany’s Bertelsmann Stiftung says the Southeast Asian nation’s economy is weak and faces challenges from overborrowing, debt obligations, a lack of reserves and currency depreciation. “The one-party state still shows no inclination toward multiparty reform,” it noted.

Laos played a major role during the Vietnam War, not only as a battleground between a royalist government and communist rebels, but also for hosting part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which carried supplies from communist North Vietnam to battle in the south. It consequently suffered some of the heaviest bombing per capita in history by the U.S. Air Force.

In December 1975, the communist Pathet Lao prevailed against the U.S.-backed royalist forces and took power, as did fraternal communist forces earlier that year in Vietnam and Cambodia.

Laos continues to maintain close relations with Vietnam, whose prime minister will pay a visit on Thursday. China has increasing influence, able to exercise its huge economic muscle in cementing economic and trade cooperation. As a landlocked nation, Laos is very reliant on its neighbors, also including Thailand, for trade as well as investment. Its leading export is electricity, produced by hydropower dams.