Now Or Never For Japan’s Opposition
When a friend of mine asked me what was happening with the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ)’s leadership race on Saturday May 16, I replied ‘the frontrunner is a 40-something Afro-Japanese woman, daughter of a US marine, who is a self-made nanotechnology business guru’. That was a joke, obviously, but it does underscore the lack of fresh faces in Japan’s political scene, and thus an absence of fresh ideas.
One of the two frontrunners is Yukio Hatoyama, a former DPJ leader who is the grandson of a former prime minister, just like incumbent Prime Minister Taro Aso, and Aso’s predecessor-but-one, Shinzo Abe. (See this link for my earlier posting on how political families weaken governance.) The other contender is Katsuya Okada, who is not a political blue blood (though his family is wealthy), but he led the DPJ to a disastrous defeat in the September 2005 elections. Still, times have changed since then, and Okada seems popular with the public.
The DPJ’s choice will be crucial, for he will lead the party into general elections, which are due by October but could come as early as July.
Regime Change In Tokyo?
It’s no exaggeration to say that the DPJ is facing a ‘now or never’ moment in its quest for power. Japan is experiencing its worst recession in 60 years, and voters are increasingly disillusioned with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has been in power since 1955. In fact, if you include the tenure of the LDP’s two precursors, it has been in power since 1948, possibly making it the world’s longest-serving ‘regime’.
Until recently, a DPJ victory seemed assured, but in March its outgoing leader Ichiro Ozawa became embroiled in a corruption scandal, forcing his resignation earlier this week. This has severely dented the DPJ’s credibility. Overall, opinion polls point to a very tight race, and it is far from clear if the DPJ can deliver a substantial swing that would allow it to take power. If the DPJ were to win, it would be the first decisive opposition victory in six decades. (The opposition held power briefly in 1993-94, but only after seven parties managed to cobble together a highly unwieldy coalition that collapsed after 11 months.)
Extended Political Deadlock Still A Risk
As far as I can see, there is a real risk that neither the DPJ nor LDP will win outright. If so, a weak coalition with smaller parties would have to be built, or the two could be forced into a ‘Grand Coalition’. More intriguing would be a ‘Grand Realigment’ under which reformers from the DPJ and LDP band together into a new party, while their conservative counterparts do the same. Japan would then have an ideologically-based two-party political system.
Yet even if Japanese voters were to elect a government committed to economic reform, implementation of reforms is questionable. As I have previously mentioned, Japan’s executive branch is weak, and thus the new government would have to enact political reform to curb the power of the bureaucrats. Secondly, a new government would be unlikely to enact potentially risky reforms in the midst of severe recession (no government anywhere likes to rock the boat in stormy seas). Thirdly, while the public seems to favour political reform, it is unclear if they favour economic reforms, given that inequalities have widened.
Therefore, even if the DPJ were to come to power, I would be cautious about expecting dramatic transformation, à la Margaret Thatcher, post 1979.