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KOIZUMI
ON THE HUSTINGS
The ghosts of elections
past
By Richard Hanson
In
this series:
Politics in the paddies
Mad cows and LDP politics
TOKYO - Talk about a bad election day. The
battle of June 25, 2000, was pretty much the pits for
the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). When the
votes were all counted, the party that has ruled Japan
for the majority of the time since 1955, failed to gain
a majority in the Lower House of the Diet (parliament).
As a result, the LDP once again was forced to govern in
three-party coalition.
Much of the blame fell
squarely on the broad shoulders of prime minister,
Yoshiro Mori, who two months earlier had taken over
after the sudden demise of the popular prime minister
Keizo Obuchi. We know now that Mori would not last very
long. He displayed such remarkably bad judgment (ie
references to Imperial Japan; choosing to finish a golf
round after being told a Japanese training ship had been
sunk by a US Navy submarine) that a Google search of
"gaffes and LDP" produces a hefty list of references
with his name on it.
Worse still, of course, the
voting results showed that an upstart reform-minded
party named the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ, or
Minshuto in Japanese) gained about enough seats
to look respectable as the leading opposition party.
This is the same party that currently has girded itself,
under its determined leader Naoto Kan, to challenge the
LDP head on, seat-by-seat, in the upcoming general
election, which takes place on Sunday, November 9.
But back in late June 2000, the LDP was in a
sorry state indeed. This was evident in skirmishes that
immediately broke out among the personal factions that
dominated the LDP landscape like potholes. Mori's
faction lost seats, but the largest of the factions -
still known then as the Obuchi faction - gained
strength.
Factional tensions rode high. Most
pundits predicted that Mori's new cabinet - described as
weak and, well, faction bound - would be short lived.
There was loud buzzing among the backers of wanna-be
premiers, including foreign minister Yohei Kono; party
heavyweight Koichi Kato and others.
One veteran
LDP "elder" that received virtually no notice as a
possible leader was Junichiro Koizumi, who was still
only in his 50s. Koizumi's job at the time was chairman
of the Mori Faction, a grouping that had its roots in
the well-respected faction of the late former prime
minister Takeo Fukuda. Koizumi, a third-generation
conservative party politician, learned his trade as
"gofer" for Fukuda - a former "imperial" Finance
Ministry official.
At the time, Fukuda's eldest
son, Yasuo Fukuda, was chosen and served as Mori's chief
cabinet secretary - the same Yasuo Fukuda who has served
that post in all three of Prime Minister Koizumi's
cabinets.
Although he received little attention,
just after the June 25, 2000, election results Koizumi,
best known as a reformist minister of health, made some
prescient comments. "It cannot be said that the Liberal
Democratic Party won," he told foreign journalists. "But
it cannot be said that anyone else has won, either."
Remember, at that point, no one, perhaps even
Koizumi himself, would realize that the only way to
avoid a future "no-win" (or perhaps a fatal loss for the
LDP) would be through a strategy that first attacked the
party itself from the inside. Today, it's a no-brainer
to figure out what Koizumi realized in June 2000.
However, two points are worth noting.
The LDP was vulnerable to even a poorly run,
faction-splintered opposition party - even if the leader
of the party was a wimp. That pretty much describes the
DPJ in 2000. The LDP donned its right-wing patriotism by
paying off farmers, offering lip service to a security
alliance with the United States and satisfying
entrenched special interests: public works and road
building, the postal empire and such. It barely worked.
The wild card was a large number of urban to semi-urban
voters, called floating or non-committed voters -
"hordes of city dwellers", as one newspaper described
them. This time around the LDP is looking hard at this
group. It is not an easy one to capture. Last week in
Saitama, a bedroom prefecture next to Tokyo, the LDP
lined up all its big guns in a by-election for an empty
Upper House seat against the DPJ candidate. The LDP won
by less than one percent of the vote.
Factions are bad politics. The public sees them as
dirty. They are. Having been battered by the power of
personal factions within the LDP, he declared war on
them during the LDP party election held last month. He
won. This does not mean the end of factions, but it may
make the LDP less prone to them while Koizumi is in
charge. If his election strategy works, that means he
will be in office - bar the unknown - for three more
years as prime minister (see Koizumi ready to storm ahead,
September 20).
Koizumi also cut to the heart of
another problem in the LDP. In his recent cabinet
reshuffle, the prime minister emphasized qualifications
such as experience, loyalty to his policies, and to a
large degree, youth. In preparing for the election,
Koizumi set a strict age rule that banned candidates
more than 73 years old from the party's slate of what
are called "proportional representation" seats, instead
of single-constituency seats.
Koizumi's actions
radically shook up the party hierarchy that is running
the election. And he drew further attention when he
appointed very popular 49-year-old Shinzo Abe, whose
late father was a party bigwig, as secretary general of
the party to run the campaign.
Then there is the
question of Japan's close relations with the United
States. Koizumi's buddy-buddy relationship with
President George W Bush has some risks, but so far the
US-Japan security pact has served to comfort Japanese
voters at a time when tension in the region is focused
largely on neighboring North Korea. The risk is whether
Naoto Kan's opposition DPJ can woo votes by opposing
Koizumi's plans to send Self Defense Forces to Iraq, an
issue that has been pushed into the shadows until after
the election is over.
About the only other
potential bombshell on Koizumi's lap is the
"independent" candidacy of former foreign minister
Makiko Tanaka. Koizumi fired Tanaka in February 2002,
sparking a firestorm that cost him a large chunk of
support, from over 80 percent to under 50 percent, which
made him vulnerable to attacks from enemies within the
LDP. That nearly scuttled his legislative agenda and its
centerpiece drive to privatize the postal system.
It was at this low point in his administration
that Koizumi received a shot in the arm from Japanese
big business. This came partly in the form of a decision
by the current chairman of Nippon Keidanren, Hiroshi
Okuda (also chairman of Toyota Motor), to support
Koizumi and his "structural reform" policies. Okuda made
it clear that this was an endorsement of Prime Minister
Koizumi, and not a return to the old cozy LDP-business
relations that were severed in 1994 over LDP scandals.
The lesson for the LDP leadership was blunt:
Koizumi has his own independent support base that is
vital for the party. Keidanren was in the midst of
starting a policy under which business members would
restart political contributions to candidates. The
lesson again is that old-style politics will not win
elections.
No matter what Koizumi does to
bolster and change his own party, the real threat to the
LDP is that the voters will decide to support the other
team - in this case, the Democratic Party of Japan. The
DPJ has recently merged with a mall party founded by
Ichiro Ozawa, a former power broker in the old LDP. That
has added zip to the DPJ, which with a "manifesto" in
hand is seriously preparing to form a coalition
government of its own if it wins enough seats.
Although Koizumi, perhaps remembering the dark
days of June 2000, takes the threat seriously, there's
no need for him to throw in the towel just yet.
One US political analyst put it this way: "As
for the upcoming election, I imagine the LDP will get
their simple majority because it is a machine-politics
election and the LDP machine works well. The voting rate
will probably be low since people expect the LDP to win
- this also favors the LDP. Also, more than Koizumi's
popularity, which is important, there is a lack of
alternatives. Nobody believes the DJP is a real
alternative. Koizumi has done what [former US president
Bill] Clinton did with triangulation and Bush did with
compassionate conservatism - carve into the opposition's
electoral base. For Koizumi this means the youth and
female vote. Bush endorsed Koizumi and the economy is
rebounding - all playing to LDP success."
What
is clear from the campaign so far is that the LDP is
trying to become a reform party. Deep down, that may be
premature. Koizumi's television spots, which mostly all
run during the morning shows, are attractive. He walks
on to a sound stage, sits on stool and says, "Nihon!
Ugokase" ("Japan! Let's move"). He has to trust that
the party and the voters are moving with him. And
remember that June 25, 2000, was not so long ago.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
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