Word: ldp
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...that forced them to resign their leadership posts. With only weeks to go before the election, the nation's largest opposition party seemed rudderless and lacking a message. Political pundits predicted a thumping defeat at the hands of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's near-hegemonic Liberal Demo-cratic Party (LDP), which has had a nearly uninterrupted hold on power for almost 50 years...
...July 11 polling day, voters responded, handing the DPJ 50 of the 121 seats contested, for a net gain of 12 seats. The LDP, meanwhile, won only 49-falling embarrassingly short even of its modest 51-seat goal. Although outright control of the government was never in question because the LDP retains a majority of the parliamentary seats that weren't up for election, the outcome has been a major blow to Koizumi, one that may cripple his ability to push through many of the financial-reform initiatives he has declared crucial to the remainder of his term (which...
...wide-ranging conversation on topics such as North Korea, the U.S.-Japan security alliance, and relations with China-all peppered with plenty of criticisms of Koizumi-Okada also made it clear that his sights were set even higher. He spoke not just of becoming an effective foil to the LDP but of actually winning a parliamentary majority in the next major election, expected to take place in approximately two years. "We see this [past] election as a stepping stone to gaining political power," he said...
Just six months ago, it looked as if Japan's calcified political system had entered a new and enlightened age. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was slowly dragging the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) into the future by racking up incremental but substantial reforms. Meanwhile, a merger between the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) and the Liberal Party last fall had created the nation's first credible opposition party of the postwar era. Led by veteran crusading outsider Naoto Kan, the new DPJ promised to enliven Japan's political stage. Vibrant and serious public debates about the nation's most pressing...
...demagoguery, but as it turned out, Kan himself had not paid into the system for 10 months in 1996. In fact, 113 members of the Diet (including seven Cabinet members) have been found so far to have been delinquent at some point. Hoping to temper the damage to the LDP with a single sacrificial lamb, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda turned in his resignation two weeks ago. Kan followed suit three days later. Late last week, Koizumi admitted that he, too, had missed a series of payments but had done so long before contributions became mandatory in 1986. Not surprisingly...