| |
Dynamic duo set sights on
Koizumi
By Richard Hanson
TOKYO - In politics, face counts. Especially the
kind that a voter might even remember. If you are
Japan's biggest opposition political party - which,
truth to tell, is still a pretty puny affair - having a
couple of recognizable faces may be far better than just
one.
That may not be exactly the spin the
Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ, or Minshuto in Japanese)
intended from the announcement last Wednesday evening of
an on-again, off-again merger deal, in which the
minuscule Liberal Party (LP, or Jiyuto) agreed to be
absorbed.
But the presentation was done with
surprising flair that grabbed headlines and made for
good television - rare for political news. That could be
a harbinger of how future political campaigns are waged
by opposition parties seeking to unseat the ruling
Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its small
conservative coalition partners.
The trick is to
bring personalities more into equation in Japan's
normally drab and political performances. That has
already happened in the LDP, where the traditional
faction-based power brokers - and their special
interests - have been stymied by the giant
personality-driven popularity and staying power of Prime
Minister Junichiro Koizumi. It seems likely that he will
win another term as party president in September.
For the first time, last week the viewing
audience saw a new, high-profile political mating
ceremony. This involved a brokered deal between the
handsome Naoto Kan - the leader of the DPJ, who in May
fumbled a merger attempt with the Liberal Party - and a
serious-looking Ichiro Ozawa.
Ichiro Ozawa?
A decade ago he was as close as you can be to a
household name in the LDP, which was soon to be voted
out of power over scandals. He is an old-style political
fixer brought up through the ranks of the old Liberal
Democratic Party hierarchy until he bolted with a number
of defectors to help form a coalition party that
actually pushed the LDP out of power (temporarily) in
1993. That was the LDP's first lapse since it was formed
in 1955.
That coalition collapsed and the LDP
returned as part of various coalitions. Typically the
LDP spent as much time seeking revenge on its internal
and external enemies as on governing the nation. That is
one reason Japan drifted politically and economically in
the late 1990s.
The merger of the Democratic
Party of Japan and the Liberal Party is not going to tip
the numbers in balance of power in the Diet (parliament)
- unless the opposition wins big in the next general
election. At most, the merged Lower House seat count
will give it control over 136 of 480 total versus the
LDP's coalition 284-seat majority.
Putting Ozawa
back into public display - with memories of his
sometimes ruthless political savvy - is enough to rattle
the backrooms of Nagatacho in Japan's political
heartland. His deal with the devil for his return from a
decade in political nowhere land was a promise to
destroy his own party. For DPJ leader Naoto Kan, that
was the condition that won over skeptics in his own
party.
In effect, Kan chose to eliminate rival
candidates who would have run against his party in the
next election. There will be a lot of squabbling within
the newly merged DPJ, which has not been able to
suppress its own factional divides ever since it was
created out or a gaggle of rogue politicians and
dead-end parties.
The media will focus keen
attention on that. But, as public relations people like
to say, any news is better than no news. Just about all
the news about the DPJ for the past year has been bad.
The significance is that the media approach to
national politics has been almost the sole property of
small group of politicians running the government,
almost all from the LDP. That has been the work of none
other than the populist Prime Minister Junichiro
Koizumi, who has led the most effective one-man
political PR campaign in memory.
Other serious
contenders on the airwaves include the good-looking,
articulate, right-wing, and loud-mouthed governor of
Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, a well-known writer-politician
who quit his Diet seat and the LDP in the 1990s.
Ishihara was re-elected governor this past spring.
But being prime minister is the best bully
pulpit around.
Since Koizumi took office in
April 2001, he has regularly made direct appeals for his
reform-minded agenda, including privatizing the postal
system and the road-construction monopoly. He even began
regular radio broadcasts to spread his appeal.
This has helped to thwart enemies within his own
party, where photogenic and powerful politicians are a
rare commodity. In the chummy, closed world of national
politics, appealing to the public never seemed necessary
for the ruling Liberal Democrats, who have formed a
coalition with two other similar parties.
Since
1998, the Democratic Party of Japan has seen its mission
as ousting the LPD. But the party leaders lacked appeal
or clout, or both. This includes party founder Yukio
Hatoyama, who resigned last December after his own plot
for a merger with Ozawa's party failed. This paved the
way for Naoto Kan's second stint as party leader.
Hatoyama simply lacked popular appeal.
They will
be battling against a prime minister with rakish good
looks who spends most of his time talking to audiences
about dull-as-mud issues like structural reform of the
postal services and the road-construction public
monopoly - albeit those are the issues that have
attracted the support of Japanese Big Business. Nippon
Keidanren, the top business lobby (which looks to
Koizumi as an advocate of its reform agenda) has
virtually adopted the prime minister - and expects him
to remain in office for some time to come.
Against such lopsided odds, can a merged
Democratic Party of Japan challenge Koizumi? Some
pundits think so.
"Japan's main opposition
party's plan to merge with a smaller group has improved
chances that Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's ruling
party will be ousted for the first time in a decade,"
writes Reuters political analyst Linda Sieg. "But the
opposition Democratic Party leader Naoto Kan faces a
tough task to convince voters - many disappointed with
Koizumi's struggling economic reform agenda - that he
can do a better job."
That is where the
personality of Kan and the skills of Ozawa will have to
provide for some sort of a potent mix. It is far too
early even to figure out what role an official or
unofficial Ozawa will play. First of all, he will have
to avoid stepping on the toes of Naoto Kan, who has
become a fast learner since taking over the party
leadership.
The first steps have been taken. In
public, the two men have appeared in numerous media fora
together. They have started to act and talk like
contenders for power.
"To create a new Japan, it
is urgent that we have real changes in government in
which the party in power and the prime minister are
replaced instead of merely alternating prime ministers
from the Liberal Democratic Party," Kan and Ozawa told
an audience in their first joint statement.
The
DPJ is honing its party platform - the term "manifesto"
is now fashionable - that hits at what they see as
Koizumi's weaknesses, mainly the economy and his
determination to send troops to Iraq to support the
efforts of Koizumi's close ally, US President George W
Bush. These are controversial subjects in Japan.
In the final hours or the regular Diet session,
which ended on Monday, the LDP and its coalition were
able to enact a key law to allow the government to send
Self-Defense Force (SDF) troops to Iraq and another
dealing with how to respond to an attack or threat of
attack on Japan. Koizumi has been supported in the
opinion polls by his government's backing of US policy
in Iraq. However, military matters are still a divisive
issue.
This is why the DPJ needs is to exploit
what one observer called Kan's "star power" and Ozawa's
wits as a political operator.
Stardom didn't
come easy to a man who trained as a patent lawyer during
the tumultuous student rebellions and labor unrest of
the late 1960s and early '70s. In the late 1970s, Kan
helped form a small leftist political party. He lost
four elections before making it as a Lower House member
from a Tokyo district. The fall of the LDP from power in
1993 gave him a break.
Kan made headlines and
made his reputation as a crusader (a handsome one, at
that) for good and against corruption as the minister of
health and welfare minister. He helped uncover a scandal
involving the use of tainted blood that was responsible
for Japan's most tragic outbreak of the infection with
the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
Ichiro
Ozawa is still looked upon with mixed feelings for his
skills as the ultimate LDP inside power broker of the
corrupt late 1980s (serving as secretary general), and
who then emerged from the massive post-bubble money
scandals of the early 1990s to plot to unseat his own
party from power for the first time since 1955.
Ozawa led the movement that created an anti-LDP
coalition and pushed for reforms of the electoral
system, making many enemies along the way. Ozawa was
sidelined by the defeat and breakup of the coalition.
This brought the return of the LDP to power in various
coalitions. He has also been dogged by medical problems.
"There is probably no politician in Japan who is
better qualified to defeat the LDP than Ozawa," says one
observer. Ozawa's role in the newly merged DPJ is not
yet clear, but he is one of those politicians who with a
higher profile could make a difference.
All this
may seem far-fetched, with Koizumi still in power. The
prime minister is the only one who can determine the
timing of a general election, which has to be called by
midsummer 2004, but will more likely come late this
year, perhaps in November. Koizumi is expected to have
no trouble being re-elected for a three-year term as
president of the LDP in September.
But that too
will be an opportunity for members of the new DPJ to
hone their skills at attacking the LDP - rather than
arguing among themselves. Politics fought by real
personalities over real issues: that may be asking too
much of Japanese politicians after a decade of political
waffling and drift. And it will require all the face
that Kan and Ozawa can conjure up.
(Copyright
2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
