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Japan: The political tournament starts
again
By Richard Hanson
TOKYO
- Mongolian Asashoryu posted an impressive win Sunday
over Iwakiyama on the opening day of the Kyushu Grand
Sumo Tournament ...
Sorry, wrong lead. Should
read:
Japan's 61-year-old Prime Minister
Junichiro Koizumi took a deep breath of relief early
Monday after confirming that his ruling Liberal
Democratic Party (LDP), and coalition partners, won -
with chilling but acceptable losses - a crucial battle
against the upstart Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), by
far the most formidable opposition party it has faced
since the LDP's founding in 1955.
There were no
impressive wins, however.
The DPJ was happy to
be the opposition party that sent those chills, and it
might have done a little bit better if more people had
turned off the opening day of the Kyushu Grand Sumo
Tournament and gone out to vote (turnout was the
second-lowest on record since a new electoral system was
introduced in the mid-1990s).
The DPJ, led by a
determined president Naoto Kan, 57, made strong gains in
the election, winning 177 seats versus a pre-election
total of 137 seats, which included some from last
summer's merger with the Liberal Party and former LDP
kingpin Ichiro Ozawa. The party aimed at winning about
200 seats.
So neither Koizumi nor Kan came out
looking brilliant.
The LDP, on its own, lost 10
seats (and any chance at a simple majority) to only 237
in the 480-seat Lower House of the Diet (parliament).
This was better than the 233 seats it won in the
disastrous election of June 2000, but it was a far cry
from the party's ambition of gaining 241 seats. That is
a black eye for the youthful (49) LDP secretary general
Shinzo Abe, who was appointed by the prime minister with
many fanfares in September after the LDP re-elected
Koizumi its president.
This puts Koizumi back in
hock to his main coalition partner, the New Komeito,
whose strength derives from an influential religious
organization called the Sokka Gakkai. The Komeito racked
up 34 seats, a gain of three seats. The other coalition
partner, the tiny New Conservative Party, lost all but
four of its seats. On Monday, the party agreed to be
merged into the LDP.
All counted, this produces
a "stable" coalition majority of 275 seats - enough to
control all key committee chair posts. This is also
enough to give the Komeito, with its own conservative
agenda, a bit more clout as a new government is planned
to be launched next week.
Still, all in all,
Sunday's general election marked what might be a
watershed in Japan's national political scene following
a decade of constant turmoil after the LDP briefly lost
control of government in 1993. This goes beyond Sunday's
election results, which were notable. What it represents
is the beginning of what most pundits ballyhoo as the
start of a two-party electoral system.
This idea
has been kicking around for the past decade, when Ichiro
Ozawa and others latched on to the idea that a
democratic country was somehow more "normal" - they used
the English word - if there were two parties battling it
out.
Sunday's results have already all but
eliminated all the small parties on the national scene,
notably what is left of Japan's postwar socialist party.
Takako Doi, the once-influential leader of the Social
Democratic Party, was defeated in her single-seat
constituency by a young LDP candidate. She will limp
back into the Diet under a proportional seat allocated
on the basis of the total for the party itself.
Until recently, the notion of the LDP (and its
now coalition of two) and the DPJ battling it out to
take turns at governing Japan was hard to swallow. This
week's results, however, have illustrated that a
relatively new broad-based party can attract a popular
following based on issues (and even values).
The
LDP has lost support from what might be called the
mainstream by advocating changes in the war-renouncing
postwar constitution. Pacifism used to be a socialist
bastion, which was too ideologically bent for most
Japanese voters. Japanese are now keenly aware of the
threat to security posed by rogue countries such as
North Korea, which makes palatable the LDP's desire to
ally itself to the US in providing Self Defense Forces
for service in Iraq. They are probably less convinced
that the United States' motivations are in Japan's best
interests.
In the coming weeks, Prime Minister
Koizumi will have to return to the more mundane problems
of an underfunded pension system and other domestic woes
that existed before the election.
Koizumi and
the LDP had counted on something like a landslide of
support from the electorate - based partly on Koizumi's
own charisma - to push through the economic and other
reforms (such as postal and public highway
privatization) that he has spoken about for more than
two years since being elected leader of the LDP in April
2001. Instead, he is back to where he was before the
election.
That in itself is not a bad thing. If
nothing else, the election has pretty much assured his
position as prime minister for the next three years.
That was his political goal to start with.
And,
as in sumo, you can never expect an impressive victory
at the start of a tournament to lead to certain victory
at the end.
(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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