JAPAN’S LACKLUSTRE general election campaign may not have the spectacle that former premier, the charismatic Junichiro Koizumi injected into the last one in 2005, but next Sunday’s vote appears nevertheless set to open a new chapter in the country’s political history.
For all but 11 months of the last 54 years the scandal-prone Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has steered Japan through a major post-war economic success story into the stagnation of the last two decades with its hallmark mix of conservative populism and cronyism. Now Prime Minister Taro Aso, renowned for his public gaffes, has run out of road, and the public – polls show – seems likely to give Mr Yukio Hatoyama’s decade-old Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) a substantial majority. Voters believe that the LDP no longer has either the will or ability to tackle deap-seated structural problems in a Japanese economy struggling through its worst recession in 60 years.
The DPJ, a sometimes incoherent mix of LDP defectors, social democrats and a few technocrats, has been a government in waiting since 2007 when it won a majority in the weak upper house of parliament. Currently holding 25 seats in the 480-seat lower house, the DPJ now hopes, and polls suggest with justification, to replace the LDP’s 300 MPs with its own similar sized majority. With 300 of the seats allocated on a winner-take-all basis, a relatively small swing could produce a massive majority, although some observers argue that fears of just such a landslide could well deter swing voters. A survey by Kyodo news agency found yesterday, however, that 43 per cent of independent voters, whose significance has grown in recent elections, are likely to opt for the DPJ, to 15.8 per cent for the LDP.
Though he exhibits a charisma deficit, Hatoyama joins a long list of international politicians modelling themselves on Barack Obama, and the party has made “change” its mantra. It has expressed a welcome willingness to reform the civil service and the country’s groaning pension system. But its proposals for a $280 a month child allowance, designed to push up the birthrate, more income support to farmers, and increases in the national minimum wage have led to some investor nervousness. Japan already has the worst fiscal position in the industrialised world with a debt-to-GDP ratio of 170 per cent. Ultimately, however, the result will have less to do with the DPJ’s manifesto than a widespread desire, all too familiar in many countries, for “anyone but the present bunch”.