Word: reformist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Koizumi isn't a Johnny-come-lately to the reformist cause; he has long championed privatizing the postal system, where Japanese have squirreled away more than $2 trillion in savings. But he's no outside agitator either. He fills a parliamentary seat that was occupied by his grandfather and father, and last fall he held back from supporting a longtime ally's abortive coup against Mori. There was also a fair bit of back-room politicking on Koizumi's behalf. At a dinner in a plush Ginza restaurant in mid-April, half a dozen conservative stalwarts, including former Prime Minister...
...unseat conservative President Jacques Chirac. The key to Socialist victory will lie in proposing policies attentive to traditional social-protection priorities, but also palatable to job- and wealth-producing businesses. That's a balancing act Strauss-Kahn mastered in the past. As economic czar, Strauss-Kahn's reformist pragmatism won the confidence of both financial markets and French voters - making him a favorite to succeed Jospin as Prime Minister in the event of a win by the left...
...beget the hard line. Hawkish elements in the Chinese leadership may be content to drag out the standoff over a downed U.S. spy plane in the hope of backing the U.S. away from selling sophisticated weapons to Taiwan - and, perhaps, to score domestic political points against their more reformist rivals in Beijing's arcane leadership struggle. But if anything, by openly challenging President Bush's prestige in its handling of the incident, Beijing may have ultimately reinforced the hawkish trend in Washington...
...leave the region of Sunday's air crash, thus avoiding sending a signal that Beijing might interpret as hostile intent. Beijing's intentions are more difficult to gauge, given the fact that the Chinese leadership is far from monolithic. A fierce power struggle has raged for years between reformist modernizers and more hard-line hawks who fear that modernization is bringing dangerous social instability, the latter being inclined to view the U.S. in more adversarial terms. Still, it's likely that Beijing, too, will want to put a ceiling on the escalation of the spy-plane showdown...
...amendment that could scuttle the whole enterprise, proposed by progressive Democrat Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, is reformist at heart. Under the current system, unions and corporations are banned from running ads that target specific candidates within 60 days of a general election or 30 days of a primary, but lets other groups do so if they disclose their funding. Wellstone's amendment extends the ban to independent advocacy groups, from the NRA to the Sierra Club, and he described his proposal as plugging a loophole...