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Koizumi's
three-year pitch
By Richard Hanson
TOKYO - Think back to a year ago, the sweltering
summer of 2002. Gulf War II in Baghdad was a George W
Bush wet dream. North Korea a
(assumed-non-nuke-until-proven) designated "axis of
evil" member. And Junichiro Koizumi a battered - but
unbeaten and still described as rakish - prime minister
crusading for reform against hardcore anti-Koizumi
factions of his own ruling Liberal Democratic Party
(LDP).
Talk about bad-hair summers.
(At
that juncture, you might have been one of many people
who dropped Japan - and Koizumi - from your radar
screen, according to an informal Asia Times Online
survey taken recently on the Eastern Seaboard of the
United States. Locally tuned radar-screen ownership in
America apparently rose sharply after September 11,
2001, and peaked during a three-week war in Iraq waged
in early April this year, followed by an Occupation.)
That makes it all the more astounding that the
now-veteran (with 26 full months in the Official
Residence) Prime Minister Koizumi, 61, has during this
very chilly summer rainy season (tsuyu in
Japanese) the pluck to imply that he intends to be the
leader of the world's second-largest economy for another
three years. Three more years. This is the
political equivalent of stepping up to bat (the Hideki
Matsui baseball type), and pointing the to left field to
indicate you are going to hit a home run and win a ball
game.
This is not just midsummer dreaming,
either.
As best as one can tell, those who have
a deep stake in such matters - large numbers of the
people of Japan, for instance - appear to have no
problem with the prospect of a Koizumi staying in
office. A year ago, it would have been unthinkable that
the popular perpetual losers of big-time Japanese
baseball, the Osaka-based Hanshin Tigers, would be on
their way to their first Central League pennant in
nearly two decades (having not taken it all since early
in the 20th century).
Okay, baseball is not
politics. But as one central banker put it succinctly:
"Prime Minister Koizumi way of politics is not like
other politics. It is not the details, but the strategy
is successful."
This refers to the way Koizumi
exploded from relative obscurity (no personal faction of
his own) within the ruling LDP to the political front
stage in April 2001. He rode a wave of popular reformist
sentiment (pro-reform, anti-old guard) to beat veteran
party leaders (an ex-premier included) to the party
presidency and the prime minister's post. A year later
during the spring of 2002, his phenomenal early
popularity ratings (over 80 percent) were shot. They
collapsed, falling to fewer than 50 percent, prompting
predictions of an early demise.
His reform
agenda was bogged down in intra-party battles to protect
such Koizumi reform targets as the huge Postal Savings
system and the public corporation that control road
construction. By the end of last July 2002's long,
scandal-packed Diet (parliament) session - lawmakers
arrested, forced to resign, fired from the cabinet and
such - Koizumi was exhausted.
It was at that
juncture that Koizumi began to get some breaks.
Hiroshi Okuda, chairman of the most powerful
big-business organization, Nippon Keidanren, or Japan
Business Federation (and chairman of Toyota Motor), and
other top business leaders, reckoned that the best thing
for business would be to support Prime Minister Koizumi
and his reform agenda. Reform or some sort was needed in
Japan was to pull itself out of a decade of poor
economic management. He decided to support Keidanren.
Later, Chairman Okuda made another key political
decision that should help Koizumi and like-minded
politicians. Nippon Keidanren decided to revive the
practice of taking a direct role in funneling political
contributions from its large corporate membership to
politicians - not just the Liberal Democratic Party,
which it bankrolled until a parting of ways in 1993,
when the LDP lost control of the government for the
first time since its formation in 1955.
This is
at the very least all good political news for Koizumi.
(The prime minister does not have a personal faction of
his own, choosing instead to remain a member of the
medium-sized faction of his predecessor, former prime
minister Yoshiro Mori.)
But political
heavyweights take Koizumi's current buoyant mood
seriously because of a growing list of positive
developments. Very few can be attributed directly to the
prime minister's stewardship, but in politics the top
dog usually benefits the most. "From the start of his
term in office, people said that Koizumi kept his job
because there was no good replacement," says one
observer. "That is still true, but it is also true that
nobody else has accomplished as much he has" on reforms.
Opposition parties can't touch Koizumi, it
seems. The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ, or Minshuto),
the largest opposition political party, with its popular
leader Naoto Kan, has adopted policy platforms that are
remarkably close to those of Koizumi. "This is a dilemma
for Kan."
The impotence of the DPJ was
demonstrated this week when the party presented and lost
a no-confidence motion against Heizo Takenaka, Koizumi's
minister for financial and economic policy in the Upper
House of the Diet (parliament). Takenaka is not a
lawmaker, and is unpopular among some LDP leaders. Last
year, the DPJ was cocky enough to target Koizumi himself
in a no-confidence move.
This week even Nippon
Keidanren's Hiroshi Okuda called on the DPJ to explain
better its polices to voters. "The DPJ's policies are
not very different from those of the ruling Liberal
Democratic Party," he said. Okuda may be scouting for
candidates to support, and even to lure bright prospects
into the Koizumi camp.
Moves to unseat Koizumi
from within the LDP have also proved half-hearted.
The prime minister's next hurdle is to be
re-elected president of the LDP in September. That is
where he is expected to be easily endorsed for a
three-year term with minimal opposition. There are
strong opponents to Koizumi, but much of the party
rank-and-file among members of the Diet are more
concerned with winning Koizumi's support to become a
member of his next cabinet to be formed by the prime
minister.
Koizumi reshuffled the cabinet for the
first time late last September, when he was riding high
from his historical official visit to North Korea to
begin normalization talks. Party leaders resent the
large number of non-politician ministers he named
(including Takenaka, who has guided a rocky effort to
resolve Japan's banking mess and fight a stagnant
economy and the dilemma deflation). What is on
everyone's mind is when Koizumi will call for a
much-anticipated general election, which must be held by
next summer.
Speculation is rampant. The
earliest option would be November, while some suspect
that Koizumi might choose to hold a double election next
year of both the Upper and the Lower houses. The point
is that the decision is Koizumi's to make. That point
needs little reinforcement other than the fortunate
signs that have begun to show up in the economy and
Japanese business itself. This is a point that has been
lost on the radar screens of many policymakers and
pundits outside of Japan.
The list of
encouraging news for Koizumi can start with a recovery
in the Japanese stock prices. This was indirectly helped
in the past few months by the government's decision to
bail out the failing Resona bank group, with a large
government capital infusion. That encouraged investors
to invest, sending Resona and other profligate bank
shares soaring. What it also highlighted was that other
more worthy, strong and profitable companies were
emerging from the past decade as strong and competitive
(Toyota Motor and such). Japanese business proved
ruthless in cutting fat, including jobs.
Even
the Bank of Japan has been indicating in its
conservative assessments of the economy that things have
stabilized, while the economy continues to grow near
zero or below. Japan is becoming more a long-term
prospect, which is attracting more investments in the
private sector. This tends to overlook problems in the
public sector, but the public seems willing to give
Koizumi the benefit of the doubt in following on a
narrower but still important sectors. His target is
privatization by 2007 of the postal system with its huge
savings and insurance functions and the
public-road-building monster.
All in all,
Japanese people are feeling a bit better about
themselves, and their economic future. That is what
voters vote for in Japan (and in countries such as the
United States).
As for the rest of the world?
Koizumi still gets credit for supporting the US
and President George W Bush in Iraq. He is faring much
better than British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who
officially visits Japan this week. The US-Japan
relationship is solid, which is comforting to the
Japanese public. Japan will take a modestly more active
role in the area of international security involving its
own Self-Defense Forces. Bar a blowup on the Korean
Peninsula, things should calmer in the region in coming
months.
His legislative agenda includes
controversial bills that include a permanent legal
framework for Japan's dispatch of Self-Defense Forces
personnel on international cooperation missions. These
will be taken up in next year's ordinary Diet session.
Things do move slowly when parliamentary democracy is
involved.
Koizumi has guarded one potentially
wobbly flank by flatly opposing a raise in the general
consumption tax - a political mistake made by some of
his predecessors - despite massive tax shortfalls that
further expand the Japan's huge national debt. Fiscal
probity will await a future generation. Over the past
decade, Japan has wobbled from so many crises that it is
hard to keep track. (This could be compared to what the
Republican Party-dominated US Congress is doing by
passing Bush's tax cuts that expand America's national
debt, but Japan has been doing this for more than a
decade. At the moment, the US Federal Reserve and others
are glomming on to Tokyo's illuminating experiences with
pernicious deflationary pressures.)
None of this
can be credited directly to anything specific that
Koizumi has done or said. He still mumbles in
hard-to-interpret phrases. All of this somehow
translates into good politics.
And that is why
Koizumi may just be able to hit his way into three more
years at bat.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online
Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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