A year ago, in August 2007, Vietnam's Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung confidently addressed a gathering of regional businessmen at an Asean 100 Leadership Forum at the Melia Hotel in downtown Hanoi. At the end, after answering a few soft questions, Dung paused, eye-balled his admiring audience, and said: "One thing I can guarantee you - political stability." The executives en masse and applauded loudly and vociferously, almost as if they were cheering a stock market bull run, not the unelected prime minister of an undemocratic communist regime...

... Either way, Dung will lose out. And it is unlikely that he will give any more guarantees about political stability, nor is he likely to hear any more rousing cheers from businessmen in the near future.