The Yomiuri Shimbun
Liberal Democratic Party executives and other senior party members are pressing Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda to decide in the first half of this week whether he will reshuffle his Cabinet.
Unless it becomes clear whether the Cabinet will be reshuffled, it will be very difficult to determine the political schedule from August.
Traveling in Australia, Tadamori Oshima, LDP Diet Affairs Committee chairman, said Friday in Sydney: "The prime minister had said he should decide key policy tasks to tackle by the end of July, and the end of the month is near. Nothing can start until he decides whether to reshuffle his Cabinet."
The LDP executives, including Secretary General Bunmei Ibuki, initially predicted that the next extraordinary Diet session would convene in late August.
Based on that assumption, they expected a Cabinet reshuffle would be made in late July or early August, giving new Cabinet members the time necessary to prepare for the session. The biggest focus of attention in the next Diet session will be on efforts to revise the new Antiterrorism Law.
However, a dispute surfaced between the LDP and its ruling coalition partner New Komeito, which is wary about bulldozing the bill through by holding a second vote in the House of Representatives to pass the bill with the ruling camp's two-thirds majority in the lower house.
The dispute spread to the LDP executives, resulting in differences of opinion over whether the extraordinary Diet session should start in late August. Political observers said Fukuda had not clarified his attitude to a Cabinet reshuffle partly because of the internal disarray in the ruling camp.
This led the top four LDP executives--Ibuki, General Council Chairman Toshihiro Nikai, Policy Research Council Chairman Sadakazu Tanigaki and Election Strategy Council Chairman Makoto Koga-- to meet in the Diet Library on Thursday night.
(Jul. 27, 2008)
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