On 2005/09/12, at 22:17, Doug Henwood wrote:
> So it looks like Koizumi kicked ass in the Japanese election. If,
> as John Mage wrote <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/
> mage140805.html> a month ago, "his noxious blend of neoliberalism
> and nationalist jingoism will be put to a test," the noxious blend
> has passed with flying colors. What happened?
The opposition, Minshuto, is basically supporting the privatization of the postal services, but they want to do that in a different way.
Since Koizumi called the election a "yes or no to the privatization" it was extremely hard for Minshuto to get a strong and convincing discourse on time. They managed to shift the interest to the pension/ china-korea/irak-SD Forces issues but not in time and not thouroughly enough to be considered credible.
Koizumi kicked out of the party _all_ the representant who had opposed the bill in the lower house, they either formed new parties (New Party Nation/ New Party Japan, no comment on the choice of names...) or ran on their own (former Post minister Mrs Noda for ex, reelected).
Meanwhile Komeito (the political branch of the SokaGakkai) gathered support with a simple message (identical to the LPD's) "Don't stop the reforms!/Support LPD"
Koizumi has managed to rally the undecided and the urbanites. The first because they could for once understand the over simplified discourse served to them (the apolitical 20-40 class, who's had no modern history class ever for most of them): "either you respect the party rule or you quit" / "the reform is about avoiding deficits in the postal services in years from now" / "the reform is the key to all other reforms" blablablablablabla. The second because in the urban areas the economy seems to be goining slightly better and Koizumi gets all the credit.
Koizumi also managed to have a few charismatic figures as new candidates in key places. Some of them made it, some of them failed locally but eventually got their seat through the proportinal system. Funny thing is that Social-Democrats (SDP-opposition) got an extra seat (total 7) because LPD ran out of candidates to fill their last winning seat...
The big winner is LPD (296/+84), other "winners" are SDP (7/+2), New Party Nation (4 out of 4 ex LPD runaways) JPC (9/+0), the big looser is Minshuto (113/-64), the other looser is Komeito (31/-3), the non affiliated LPD runaways (14 out of 31 candidates), New Party Japan (1 out of 3 LPD runaways, I think one was from Minshuto though), 5 unaffiliated were elected, categorized in opposition.
Of course the upper house is still free to refuse to support Koizumi, but they lack support in the lower house now since a lot of their supporters are gone.
In the rural areas Minshuto has managed a few stunts, like sending a representant from Kagawa (where I live) where only LPD representant have ever been elected. I think the sheer number of seats hides 2 facts:
1) Komeito has been instrumental in getting LPD representants to the Diet. They even pay the price of their success since LPD does not need Komeito now to have a majority (296/480 for LPD, 327/480 with Komeito) I wonder how that will play when issues related to Yasukuni/ the peace constitution and other touchy things will be dealt with by the hard right that supports Koizumi.
2) Minshuto has lost a lot, but like in my very rural area, new candidates had very good scores even though they were totally unknown a month before. They need to get some political momentum to make it the next time. Just like some of the local LPD candidates in urban areas lost because they relied too much on their name and not enough on the policies they were supporting (running the election the traditional way), rural areas of Japan are slowly seeing a shift to "policy" politics where the name of the candidate will matter less than what (s)he supports.
My totally uninformed bet is that the new government will do a few spectacular things before the new kids in town get tired of party politics. Plus the upper house may not be 100% conciliant, although the mood right now is not at rebelling against the will of the people, but that won't last long, since a lot of commentators are positively horified at the idea that LPD can now do whatever it wants pretty much.
Koizumi has managed a wonderful political trick, the thing that Chirac attempted in 95 and that miserably failed... If the timing had been different, Minshuto would not have lost that much. Nobody really cared about the "reform" (whatever that really means) before Koizumi made a show of it.
Jean-Christophe Helary
ps: you should follow the analysis on Asahi, Nikkei, or Yomiuri. I posted links earlier today.