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Japan's opposition struggles for
relevance
By Richard Hanson
TOKYO - Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was
about the only politician or pundit with a constructive
word about the leadership election held by the
Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), the second-largest
party in the land, this week.
The nemesis of the
DPJ, which re-elected Yukio Hatoyama to a third term as
party president, suggested he present the nation with a
"constructive" policy platform. "They should say, 'This
is what we will do if we take over the government,'"
Koizumi advised, while hobnobbing with world leaders at
the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) in Copenhagen.
That sort of barb was almost the kindest cut at
the DPJ after the party votes were counted on Monday. In
a final runoff vote, Hatoyama, a party founder, barely
defeated (by 12 votes) his fellow party elder and rival,
the popular secretary general Naoto Kan, who was
defeated in a 1999 party poll.
Other
challengers, including one candidate backed by a new
youth faction in the quite youthful party, fell to
defeat by splitting votes along the lines drawn through
the most faction-ridden of the opposition parties.
The DPJ failed to rally much interest in its
future from within the party. Just over half of
registered party members bothered to vote. In the end,
Hatoyama squeezed in with the votes of rank-and-file
party members versus the party office holders - or
seekers - who backed Kan.
The general public
seems indifferent about the party. Recent polls show the
DPJ is favored by fewer than 10 percent of the people
surveyed. But polls are fickle things, as Koizumi found
early this year when his support plunged from 80 percent
to about 40 percent as scandals and party strife hit the
Koizumi cabinet hard.
Truth be told, only
Koizumi's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) can
claim a more fractious political gaggle as its core
membership. The conservative LDP rules in a coalition
with two other very small conservative parties (the New
Komeito and the New Conservative Party).
Koizumi
isn't even a faction leader in the main LDP, where he is
bitterly opposed for his pro-reform agenda by
anti-reform faction leaders. It is only lately that
Koizumi's fortunes in the support barometers have risen.
He was helped by a historic and ground-breaking trip to
North Korea, the first by a sitting Japanese prime
minister. Koizumi is also benefiting from stronger
backing from big business groups, which favor his
structural reform platform.
The question at
hand, however, is what is to become of the leading
opposition party if its chances of defeating of all
comers and leading a government are close to zero for
the foreseeable future, which is what many political
pundits agree is currently the case.
An analysis
by Daisuke Yamamoto, a political writer for Kyodo News,
Japan's leading news service, sums up that view rather
brutally. Yamamoto concludes, "By re-electing Yukio
Hatoyama to his third term as leader of the DPJ, the
nation's largest opposition party appears to be taking
yet another step toward irrelevancy."
The
problem with Hatoyama is that he is "only modestly
popular and lacks the vigor to exert strong leadership".
Most party members seem to be more concerned with the
status quo than with rocking the boat. That said, there
does seem to be a sense of deep relief within the party
that indeed the status quo has been rescued from a
possibly disastrous return of the outgoing secretary
general Kan. The new secretary general is a man named
Kansei Nakano, who is not a boat rocker. The fact is
that for all the DPJ's pretensions at replacing the LDP
in the next general election, it has become a party full
of people who have no other place to go.
The DPJ
has been described as an "election cooperative" rather
than a political party. The majority of DPJ members
elected to the Diet (parliament) are refugees from other
parties, including a large number from the LDP, where
Hatoyama has his roots. Many others are from the long
list of parties that have died in the past decade after
the scramble to replace the LDP when it lost control of
government in 1993.
The make-up of the DPJ
includes a remarkable number of relatively young and
ambitious lawmakers. Many of these politicians left the
LDP because of a stifling seniority and faction system
that takes years to move up through.
Hatoyama
has tried to mold the DPJ in the image of a more liberal
organization than the LDP. He comes from a wealthy
family of prominent politicians, including his
grandfather Ichiro Hatoyama, who merged the his
Democratic Party with the Liberal Party in 1955 to form
the Liberal Democratic Party of its current vintage. The
grandson took the name and inherited part of the family
fortune. The fortune is said to be one reason that the
DPJ can afford to be a party.
So is the DPJ
irrelevant?
Not as far as Koizumi is concerned.
His advice to Hatoyama about forming a policy agenda
that would explain what the party would do if it
replaced the LDP is sincere advice. Koizumi himself has
enough problems striking a balance between his enemies
in the factions of the LDP and the policy platform he
has championed since taking over as head of the party in
April 2001.
In the next few days, the prime
minister will be faced with decisions on selecting a new
set of top party officials. This time he wants to select
politicians who will support his agenda of reform,
rather than try to thwart his legislative initiatives.
In the tumultuous Diet session that ended in
July, Koizumi was able to pass only parts of two of his
major reform items, dealing with national health and the
very hard-fought battle to reform the huge postal
system, a wealth of largesse for the LDP faithful. There
have been times when Koizumi might have preferred to
abandon his own party and lead an independent reform
movement.
The relevance of the DPJ is that it
teaches reformers that the chances of policy success
outside the ruling party are slim indeed.
After
Koizumi selects his party leaders, he will turn to the
cabinet, which is still his first cabinet except for one
major departure (ex-foreign minister Makiko Tanaka). The
cabinet gets mixed grades for competency in steering
Japan's economic and financial ship. With a rise in
popularity and an infusion of support from powerful
backers of reform - the business community, in
particular - Koizumi may just succeed.
(©2002
Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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