Peter Alford, Tokyo correspondent |
July 18, 2009
JAPAN'S Liberal Democratic Party, like many other dominant political groups faced with long-anticipated but suddenly imminent disaster, has this week suffered an outbreak of collective derangement.
The party which since 1955 has lost just one House of Representatives election - in 1992, though it later sneaked back into government by an ideology-defying coalition with the Socialists - now risks not just defeat but disintegration.
One sign of madness is to obsessively repeat behaviour that has consistently failed and so the LDP, on its fourth leader in three years, was this week riven by an uprising of MPs who want Taro Aso to hand the office of prime minister over to someone else.
The LDP executive yesterday ran off the road a bid backed by 135 Diet members' signatures to convene a formal party meeting at which Mr Aso's leadership would be questioned and a move to depose him might be launched.
Some of the 135 have since been persuaded to withdraw, allowing the executive to rule the uprising led by former party secretary general Hidenao Nakagawa, was not supported by the requisite third of the parliamentary party.
There will instead be an informal meeting next week, at which Mr Aso will try to placate his opponents but Mr Nakagawa, for one, will continue to seek the PM's removal before the scheduled August 30 election.
But the damage is done already. Among their many other bitter discontents, voters now know up to one third of his party want Mr Aso gone.
Why? Because he failed to win their trust and because he seemed to have fatally mistimed his election schedule.
Last September, most of the LDP thought it was choosing a leader to rush them swiftly to an election, before their already woeful polling numbers worsened.
Mr Aso, elected party president and therefore the next prime minister at his fourth attempt on the day before his 68th birthday, promised just that.
That was also the month, however, the full cyclonic force of global economic crisis began lashing Japan and he quickly decided the LDP's only hope was to hang tight and try to win credit for leading a recovery.
Mr Aso gambled a very likely early loss of government against the desperate long-shot of using all his remaining time during a raging economic crisis trying to rehabilitate the LDP.
It was a desperate risk-reward calculation but his party's last credible claim on government was that the LDP alone had the experience, skills and leverage with the bureaucracy and business to guide Japan through dangerous times.
Today Mr Aso gives even his Diet supporters little cause for confidence.
But the MPs most likely to be wiped away in August are not his; they are "Koizumi's Children", the wave of supposed reformers washed into the Diet by Junichiro Koizumi's smashing victory over the Democratic Party of Japan in September 2005.
They, who seemed to offer a popular way forward with Koizumi-ite reforms of the economy and party, were to be progressively frozen out by his three successors.
Now they stand in the front line against the DPJ assault which will first regather seats lost four years ago.
However, though Mr Nakagawa was a close Koizumi aide and ally, this week's events are mischaracterised as a reformers' uprising.
Koichi Kato, one of Mr Koizumi's angriest conservative critics in later years, is deeply involved, but Koizumi trusty and mid-sized faction boss, Taku Yamazaki, is not.
Of the three possible near-term leaders who signed, only Yuriko Koike is a committed Koizumi-ite, an elder sister of the Children but not much liked within the party or among its core voters.
Most of all, the signatories look like a "do something, do anything" alignment, resisted by other MPs resigned to riding the LDP nosedive with Mr Aso but hoping to walk away from the crash scene.
The true loopiness of the uprising glints through with the unresolved question: replace Mr Aso with whom?
Mr Nakagawa has not proposed anyone publicly and it is not at all clear who he has in mind. No one has volunteered.
But unless he or she were to manifest a dramatic, Koizumi-like appeal that has so far gone undetected, many voters are likely to reject the switch as a cheap, desperate attempt to avert real regime change.
The last possible election Sunday is October 18, three months hence; the new leader would not in any real sense lead the party or the country.
He or she would be no more than the LDP's electoral "beard".
But the Tokyo assembly result, the preceding Shizuoka governor's election, and the response to the DPJ's own leadership problem suggest public cynicism towards the governing party has reached a cancerous intensity.
The only stage in the past 10 months that Mr Aso's gamble with time seemed viable was March-April when then opposition leader Ichiro Ozawa was entangled by a campaign funding scandal.
But Mr Ozawa, who consistently rates as the senior politician most disliked by most Japanese voters, finally quit and under Yukio Hatoyama the DPJ's poll ratings immediately snapped most of the way back.
That can't just be about removing the stain of misbehaviour because his party has continued to loom since Mr Hatoyama confessed to his own funding rort, complete with zombie donors, or at least dead people's names used to hide contributions from living donors.
Mr Ozawa remains firmly settled in the cockpit of the DPJ's campaign machine, the position from which he has always done most damage to his opponents.
Inevitably the LDP will campaign hard on Mr Ozawa's not-so-hidden grip on Mr Hatoyama and on funding gaps in the DPJ's comprehensive but rather hopeful policy platform.
At the moment, though, many voters, even many formerly locked-in LDP supporters, seem to care only about passing a punishing verdict on the governing party.
The Liberal Democratic Party is in danger of becoming a toxic brand.
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