Landslide reshapes Japanese
politics By J Sean Curtin
In a dramatic night that shared more
similarities with a mafia movie plot than a
Japanese election, Japanese Prime Minister
Junichiro Koizumi on Sunday slaughtered the
opposition and liquidated internal party rivals.
He now begins a new reign as the undisputed
godfather of Japanese politics.
Koizumi's
Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)has capturing 296
seats, giving the party its best election result
since 1986. Koizumi focused his campaign around
the issue of postal privatization, a strategy that
clearly struck a chord with the majority of the
electorate.
The LDP sailed past the
269-seat mark needed for an absolute majority in
the 480-seat Lower House, putting the party in a
position to govern alone if it decides. However,
Koizumi said he wants to maintain the current
coalition with the New Komeito
Party, which secured
31 seats, down three. Together the two control 327
seats, giving them a two-thirds majority in the
lower chamber and the power to override the unruly
Upper House, which last month blocked Koizumi's
postal privatization bills. This rejection
triggered the snap general election in which
Koizumi fielded rival candidates, nicknamed
"assassins", against rebel LDP Lower House
lawmakers who had voted against his postal
privatization bills.
It was a dreadful
night for the main opposition Democratic Party of
Japan (DPJ), which lost more than 60 seats to end
up with just 113 lawmakers. Despite running a
competent campaign, the DPJ was simply overwhelmed
by the unstoppable Koizumi bandwagon. As soon as
the scale of the losses became clear, grim-aced
DPJ leader Katsuya Okada resigned.
Liberal
Democratic Party
296
Democratic Party of Japan
113
New
Komeito
31
Japanese
Communist Party
9
Social
Democratic Party
7
Independents (rebels)
13
Independents (others)
5
People's
New Party (PNP)
4
Nippon
New Party (NNP
1
Shinto
Daichi
1
LDP-Komeito coalition
327
Combined
opposition
153
As the
extraordinary magnitude of his victory became
clear, a jubilant Koizumi declared, "The LDP has
changed and this election has changed Japanese
politics."
With such a strong mandate from
voters, Koizumi now intends to drive forward his
stalled structural reform agenda. The surge in
support for the LDP has greatly strengthened the
prime minister's personal authority and
significantly weakened the influence of the dovish
Komeito.
Mission impossible When
Koizumi called a snap general election after the
Upper House rejected his postal privatization
plans, most LDP lawmakers, as well as the majority
of political analysts - including this one -
thought it was an incredibly risky political
gamble, if not a suicidal move. With the LDP so
badly split over postal reform, political logic
clearly indicated that the LDP would find the
campaign difficult, and most LDP lawmakers were
privately saying it would be an extremely tough
fight.
The opposition DPJ was overjoyed,
genuinely believing that it could snatch power.
However, Koizumi's political instincts proved to
be far superior to those of his own lawmakers, the
opposition and political pundits. Overcoming
initially daunting odds, he defied political
gravity to accomplish the political equivalent of
mission impossible.
In the process,
Koizumi has established himself as one of the most
gifted political performers in postwar Japanese
politics and an absolute genius at reading Japan's
political pulse.
Unaffiliated voters
decide Koizumi realized that the path to
victory lay with floating voters. Normally
unaffiliated voters make up the biggest electoral
constituency, so attracting them is the key to
success. To draw these crucial voters to his
banner, Koizumi cast himself as the messianic
reformer public opinion polls indicated the public
has long yearned.
By selecting well-known
and popular figures to run against LDP rebels,
Koizumi was able to dominate the media headlines.
The gripping battles between his hit-squad and its
would-be victims generated so much media interest
that it proved impossible for the opposition to
compete. Younger voters were especially excited by
the clash of rebels and assassins, seeing Koizumi
as a crusading reformer who was shaking up the
normally dull political scene.
Droves of
the floating voters, who normally opted for the
opposition DPJ, chose Koizumi's re-branded LDP,
giving it a massive victory. Ex-cons trump
assassins While political logic seemed to
dictate that fielding two LDP candidates in the
same constituency would be a vote-splitter, the
high-risk policy spectacularly paid off and the
liquidators took out some of the premier's most
powerful LDP critics. One of these scalps included
former LDP transport minister Takao Fujii, who
lost his once-safe Gifu number four constituency
by nearly 30,000 votes to a Koizumi ""assassin".
However, more than half the postal rebels
survived the liquidation attempts and were
reelected. They included Koizumi's bitter archfoe
Shizuka Kamei, who easily dispatched his
high-profile would-be terminator, Takafumi Horie,
by a margin of nearly 26,000 votes
In
total, 18 of the 33 LDP rebels survived. If their
numbers were added to the official LDP tally of
296, the party would break its 1986 highpoint of
300 seats achieved under former prime minister
Yasuhiro Nakasone.
While the majority of
assassins missed their targets, all the ex-cons
running in the election hit the jackpot. Convicted
bribetaker and former LDP deputy chief cabinet
secretary Muneo Suzuki won big in Hokkaido, former
LDP construction minister and jailbird Kishiro
Nakamura took the Ibaraki number seven seat and
ex-con Kiyomi Tsujimoto grabbed the Osaka number
10 district for the Social Democratic Party.
With an election cast comprising
assassins, ex-cons, rebels and a plot involving
large-scale political slaughter orchestrated by a
powerful mafia-like don, it is hardly surprising
Japanese voters flocked to the polls. TV Asahi
predicted turnout would be about 67%, up from 60%
in the 2003 Lower House election.
J
Sean Curtin is a GLOCOM fellow at the
Tokyo-based Japanese Institute of Global
Communications.
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