Election won, civil war resumed
( 2003-11-11 10:08) (Economist.com)
The ruling coalition won Japan's general election
on Sunday, but the opposition's strong showing will soon have the prime minister
and his party back at each other's throats.
Judging by the photographs, it was a stunning victory for the
opposition. On Monday November 10th, the day after voters went to the polls,
Japan¡¯s newspapers ran pictures of a grim-looking Junichiro Koizumi next to
shots of a beaming Naoto Kan. Despite his grin, Mr Kan still holds the same post
that he occupied before the election: head of the Democratic Party of Japan
(DPJ) and leader of the opposition. But even though Mr Koizumi's coalition has
managed to maintain its hold on power, the DPJ gained lots of ground and the
prime minister's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) was forced to merge with one of
its two coalition partners to maintain a slim majority. The outlook for reform
remains muddled¡ªfor the moment. Much depends on who wins the blame game that
will now break out inside the LDP.
Both Mr Koizumi and his anti-reform opponents in the LDP will find cause to
say "I told you so". The prime minister has been warning his party for months
that the days of complacent rule are ending, and that competition from the
rising DPJ makes reform a political necessity. To a supporter of economic
reform, the DPJ's impressive gains (it added 40 seats, and now holds 177 of
parliament¡¯s 480 spots), and the manner in which it picked them up, would seem
to support Mr Koizumi's arguments in the LDP debate.
The DPJ has bolstered its claim to be a broad-based, mainstream party
with a bent for reform and a legitimate chance of winning power one day. It took
a big step in this direction in September by merging with the next-biggest
opposition party, the Liberals. It took another big step in Sunday¡¯s election,
by gaining seats partly at the expense of the other two sizeable opposition
parties: the Japan Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party. Many voters
seem to have concluded that a vote for any party except the DPJ was in effect a
vote for the status quo.
Arguably, the DPJ would have done even better had Mr Koizumi given in to his
own party's anti-reformers. Mr Kan based the campaign on a detailed DPJ
"manifesto", which laid out specific policy targets and timetables for
everything from decentralisation to cuts in public-works spending. This helped
to centre the debate on big issues. The manifesto was broadly reformist. It
argued for reining in the central bureaucracy and cutting subsidies to special
interest groups who have long backed the LDP. In essence, the DPJ told voters
that it was more committed to reform than Mr Koizumi.
Mr Koizumi can make a strong case, therefore, that the election was a battle
over which party was most committed to, and capable of, reform; and that the LDP
hung on to 237 of its 247 seats (and added four more on Monday by merging with
the New Conservative Party) largely because the prime minister had ignored the
squeals within his own party and championed a reformist agenda. Even as the
votes were being counted, however, Mr Koizumi¡¯s opponents in the LDP were
arguing the opposite. Mr Koizumi bullied them into silence, they complained, by
claiming that his national popularity and reformist message would deliver the
goods on election day. They are now saying he has been proved wrong.
His policies, they argue, have hurt them in two ways. Because he failed to
lubricate the traditional LDP electoral machinery¡ªincluding farmers,
construction firms and mom-and-pop firms¡ªthe party was unable to grind out
enough votes in many hard-fought districts. Moreover, they say, Mr Koizumi's
policies of cutting public works and encouraging banks to abandon weak borrowers
have hurt the economy. If he had pursued "anti-deflation" policies, as they
asked, the argument goes, recent signs of a mild economic recovery would now be
much stronger. The DPJ's reformist message would have lost much of its appeal,
and more voters would have stuck with the devil they know. This policy battle is
not new: it has raged inside the LDP since Mr Koizumi took over the party in
April 2001.
As the prime minister and his party prepare to resume their fight, they must
also gird themselves for two other sources of tension. First, the rift could
grow between lower-house MPs (who will now take their seats and resume their
criticism of Mr Koizumi) and the LDP¡¯s upper-house members (who will need to
fight an election next year, and may still feel that Mr Koizumi is their best
weapon). Second, the LDP¡¯s remaining coalition partner, New Komeito, may expect
a greater say in decisions after a strong showing at the polls. One of Komeito's
clearest issues in the campaign was a call to take pensions reform more
seriously.
So, Mr Koizumi has his work cut out. With luck, he will conclude that many
Japanese voters really do support reform¡ªand that the surest way to lose their
backing would be to cave in to the critics in his own party.
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