| Home > North-East Asia >> Japan | |
After a year, Japan's Democratic Party slips
Agence France Presse - August 29, 2010
Kyoko Hasegawa, Tokyo – A year after sweeping to power in a landslide win, Japan's center-left governing party is unpopular, divided and hobbled by policy gridlock as it grapples with pressing economic problems.
After a sobering first 12 months since its Aug. 30 victory, and already led by their second prime minister, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) faces the prospect of yet another power change in coming weeks.
A party that promised weary voters people power after more than five decades of almost unbroken conservative rule is now seen offering business as usual instead as factional infighting consumes the political class.
It has not been an auspicious period for a party that promised to revolutionize Japanese politics, most political observers will agree.
"What on earth are these people doing? Many voters must feel disgusted," thundered an Asahi Shimbun editorial last week, criticizing the ruling party's "highly inward-looking power struggle."
Prime Minister Naoto Kan, 63, just three months into office,faces a leadership challenge from a scandal-tainted power-broker, 68-year-old Ichiro Ozawa, at party leadership elections in mid-September.
If Kan loses, Ozawa would become Japan's sixth premier in four years, exacerbating Japan's decades-old leadership merry-go-round that has helped erode the country's stature on the international stage.
The internal squabbling comes at a time when Japan can ill afford it.
Economic growth slowed sharply to an annualized 0.4 percent in the second quarter, with rising giant China overtaking graying Japan as the world's number two economy.
The DPJ has already abandoned many of the big-spending promises that brought the party to office under ex-premier Yukio Hatoyama – -- ranging from child allowance to toll-free highways – and instead stressed a path of fiscal austerity.
But his straight talk on the need for higher taxes quickly backfired and led to heavy losses in July upper house elections that left the DPJ without a majority in that chamber, making it more difficult to pass laws.
"The DPJ dashed voter expectations by failing to keep its idealistic pledges," said Shujiro Kato, politics professor at Toyo University.
"With a hung Parliament, you have to seek ways to cooperate with the opposition, otherwise you can't pass bills. This is a novel challenge for Japanese politics, which has long had no serious change of governments."
Most observers agree the rookie government has managed to squander much of the goodwill it had when it won office as usually risk-averse voters ousted the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) last year.
On the foreign policy front, too, Tokyo still has some way to go to fully mend ties with key ally Washington over a dispute that sealed the fate of the first premier, Hatoyama, after less than nine months in office.
Hatoyama, promising "more equal" ties with the United States, vowed to move an unpopular US airbase off Okinawa island, then changed his mind – -- managing to alienate both Okinawans and the Obama administration.
His flip-flopping drove his poll ratings below 20 percent and cost him his job, with Kan taking his place – but the problem has not gone away, with islanders still determined to reduce the US military presence.
Some analysts say Japan's government is still getting used to wielding power in what is now a real two-party system, and to having to adapt promises it made in opposition to the more complex realities of governing.
Mikitaka Masuyama, politics professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, said: "Under the two-party system, both the ruling and opposition parties have to face realpolitik."
Hiroshi Hirano, politics professor at Gakushuin University, said what many voters now believe: "The change of government revealed that the difference between the DPJ and the LDP is not all that great."
See also:
 |