JAPANESE VOTERS are on the brink of doing something they have not been willing to do in more than half a century: throw the bums out, writes BLAINE HARDENin Tokyo
The opposition Democratic Party is surging toward what polls predict will be a landslide victory on Sunday. It would end 54 years of near-continuous rule by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which led Japan to stupendous post-war wealth but in recent years has become stagnant, sclerotic and poisonously unpopular.
The opposition party’s leader, Yukio Hatoyama (62), an elegantly attired, Stanford-educated engineer, seems to derive much of his popularity from the simple act of being a sentient replacement for prime minister Taro Aso, whose tone-deaf leadership over the past year has made him an object of derision, even in his own party.
In the election’s final week, Hatoyama is drawing big crowds for his signature stump speech, which savages “the long-term reign of one party gone rotten.”
But voters seem less than certain about what will replace it. “I am not sure of what the Democratic Party is saying or what it will do, but there has to be a change in power,” says Hideo Enomoto (58), who listened this week as Hatoyama spoke outside a commuter train station during the evening rush hour.
Senior LDP leaders acknowledged this week that the Democratic Party was on the verge of a historic win that may provide it with a commanding two-thirds majority in the lower house of parliament and the ability to decide policy all by itself. The Democratic Party already controls the less powerful upper house.
The prospect of tossing the LDP out of power has created the highest level of voter interest in a general election to date, according to a survey by the Yomiuri newspaper. In the poll, 89 per cent of respondents indicated interest in the vote.
As its key incentive for dumping the LDP, the Democratic Party is promising to pay parents as much as $276 a month to raise a child.
Japan has the world’s lowest percentage of children and highest percentage of elderly. It’s a slow- motion demographic disaster that the LDP has long ignored and that the Democratic Party hopes to turn into electoral gold.
“If that money is going to come, then it is well worth voting for the Democratic Party,” said Aya Koike (20), who came with her two infant children to listen to Hatoyama’s speech. She works nights in a Tokyo restaurant but could quit if the government began paying her $552 a month to look after her children.
Many young women in Japan are reluctant to have children because of the lack of affordable daycare.
Promising to “take the anxiety out of child rearing”, the Democratic Party has said that it will eliminate waiting lists for cheap public daycare and remove tuition fees for secondary school.
Hatoyama’s party is also promising to do away with motorway tolls, cut business taxes and increase the minimum pension – all without raising the consumption tax in the near future. The party also says that it will somehow find a way not to increase the staggering government debt, which is the highest among industrialised nations at 180 per cent of GDP.
“It is doubtful that they can really deliver on all this,” said Richard Jerram, chief economist at Macquarie Capital Securities in Tokyo. “Once they win, maybe they will water down their promises. If they don’t, it is going to be problematic.”
The Japanese economy, although it returned to growth in the second quarter of this year, has been the hardest hit of all industrialised countries by the global recession.
Most voters, according to polls, doubt that the party can raise the money needed to pay for its promised programmes, which add up to about $178 billion in new spending. The party says it will find the funds by ending wasteful spending, tapping “buried treasure” in obscure bureaucratic accounts and abolishing some tax deductions.
Voters do believe will happen after the election – and what the Democratic Party seems capable of delivering – is a substantial change in the way the government is run. For decades, an elite bureaucracy has quietly controlled much of government policy, often aligning it with the interests of the country’s largest corporations.
Hatoyama’s party is promising to blow up this system, replacing it with a “politician-led government in which the ruling party holds full responsibility.”
To that end, it plans to place more than 100 members of parliament in charge of the various bureaucracies and require them to take marching orders from the prime minister’s office.
It says it will ban corporate political donations, restrict the ability of retired bureaucrats to find lucrative jobs in industries they regulated and ban hereditary seats in parliament. About a third of LDP members in the lower house have inherited their electoral districts from relatives.
During the more than five decades of LDP rule, the main pillar of the party’s foreign policy has been a close and cooperative relationship with the United States, which guarantees Japan’s safety and keeps about 50,000 military personnel here.
The somewhat left-leaning Democratic Party has been less enamoured of this special relationship. Its leaders want to give foreign policy a more Asian tilt, eventually creating an East Asian community with China, South Korea and other countries. – (Los Angeles Times- Washington Post service)
