Lao People's Revolutionary Party
라오인민혁명당
The ruling party of Laos, founded on 22 March 1955 as the Lao People's Party by Lao communists from the former Indochinese Communist Party. Through the Pathet Lao it led the insurgency against the Royal Lao Government and supported North Vietnamese forces, and since establishing the Lao People's Democratic Republic in December 1975 it has ruled as the sole party. It took its present name in 1972 and began market reforms in the mid-1980s.
In depth
The party's forerunner was the Indochinese Communist Party founded by Ho Chi Minh in 1930. According to the English source this Vietnamese-dominated party had no Cambodian or Laotian members until its formal dissolution on 11 November 1945, whereas the French source says a Lao section was founded in 1936. Recruitment of Lao cadres began in 1946, when Kaysone Phomvihane and Nouhak Phoumsavanh, students in Hanoi, joined. When the ICP became the Workers' Party of Vietnam in February 1951, only 81 of its 2,091 members were Lao.
The Lao People's Party was established at a founding congress on 22 March 1955. According to the French source, the congress met clandestinely in Sam Neua with 25 delegates, and the party had about 300 members and was in practice a Lao branch of the Vietnamese party. It kept its existence secret and worked through mass fronts such as the Pathet Lao and the Lao Patriotic Front. Nearly annihilated by government repression in 1959, it controlled nearly half the country by the early 1960s as North Vietnamese support increased. At its Second Congress in February 1972 it renamed itself the Lao People's Revolutionary Party.
A peace agreement of 21 February 1973 set up a Provisional Government of National Unity led by Souvanna Phouma. In 1975, as the Pathet Lao seized the roads to Vientiane and protests forced five cabinet members to resign, the monarchy agreed on 26 November to abdicate, and on 1–2 December a National Congress of People's Representatives abolished the Kingdom and established the Lao People's Democratic Republic. By 1980 ten per cent of the population had left the country. In its first years in power the party remained secretive, so that General Secretary Kaysone was unknown to most citizens, and public faces of the movement such as Lao Patriotic Front chairman Souphanouvong were swept aside.
The party began collectivising agriculture in 1978, gave it up in 1981 in the face of resistance, and by 1990 virtually all cooperatives had ceased to exist. At the Fourth Congress in 1986 it began dismantling Soviet-style planning and severing state enterprises from the state budget, and in 1988 it adopted laws friendly to foreign investment. Aid from the Eastern Bloc fell from US$52 million in 1988 to US$1 million in 1989 and stopped in 1990. In 1990 three officials, including Vice-Minister Thongsouk Saisangkhi, who had called for a multi-party system, were imprisoned.
A new constitution then defined Laos as a people's democratic state under the party's leadership, and Article 3 of the constitution guarantees the party's monopoly of power. The party statute names Marxism–Leninism and Kaysone Phomvihane Thought as guiding ideology, and from the 1990s the party adopted state capitalism as a tool for building the material base of socialism. Kaysone was general secretary from 1955 until his death in 1992; after Khamtai Siphandon, Choummaly Sayasone and Bounnhang Vorachith, Thongloun Sisoulith has been general secretary since 2021.