Japanese have already decided

Peter Alford, Tokyo Correspondent
August 15, 2009
Article from: The Australian

OFFICIALLY, Japan's general election campaign begins on Tuesday; in reality, it's been going for a month already and the tide is still running as hard against Taro Aso's government as at the outset.

Mr Aso's last real hope when his colleagues sullenly accepted his timetable was that an historically protracted campaign would bog the Democratic Party of Japan's momentum in the wet sand of unresolved policy questions, particularly funding its big-spending social policies.

"We have 40 days of campaigning and I think the people's minds, which were very impassioned at one point in time, have started to cool off," said Liberal Democratic Party secretary general Hiroyuki Hosoda the other day.

"Some of the people who thought 'DPJ at all costs', changing the parties in power, are starting to think more rationally and coolly."

If Mr Hosoda is suggesting "some people" are enough to swing momentum back towards the LDP and its coalition partner New Komeito, then this weekend, two-thirds of the way to August 30, there is no discernible evidence of the shift.

The global economic crisis, which has slammed Japan as hard as any of the big economies, has not helped Mr Aso's cause, but if the recession and competence to manage it were the decisive question, his party would still be in the running.

Instead, the latest polls show the DPJ -- never before even close to power and with only a couple of handfuls of MPs previously associated with government -- attracting between 34 and 41 per cent public support.

The LDP, which has been out of government only 11 months since 1955, is polling between 13 and 24 per cent.

The margins are similar, though reversed, to polling in 2005 a fortnight before Junichiro Koizumi's LDP returned with 296 MPs plus 31 New Komeito to dominate the 480-seat House of Representatives and a shattered opposition.

But most polls this week show significantly fewer undecided voters than at the same stage in 2005.

Pollsters who ask the question "do you intend to vote on August 30?" are getting stronger read-backs than in 2005 when, as it turned out, the 67.1 per cent turnout was the highest in a decade.

No survey, however, betrays anything like the firebrand enthusiasm for DPJ leader Yukio Hatoyama, nor trust in his competence, that Mr Koizumi enjoyed right up to his departure three years ago.

That is one of the more chilling aspects for Mr Aso's brains trust at LDP headquarters, underscoring that for most engaged voters the election is not fundamentally about ideology, perceived competence, or Mr Hatoyama's blurry policies and persona.

It's about a thirst for change, vengeance even for all the miseries and betrayals economically vulnerable people, particularly, feel they have suffered at the hands of the post-Koizumi LDP.

A recent Yomiuri Shimbun poll spelled it out.

The same sample that believed the LDP was more likely to be capable in government (43 per cent to DPJ's 31 per cent) and better able to fund its promises (35 per cent to 31 per cent) intended to vote 41 per cent DPJ and 24 per cent LDP.

As one commentator put it: "The media and the voting public smell blood -- LDP blood".

At the official campaign launch on Tuesday, the candidates will don white gloves and official sashes and board their loudspeaker vans but the cacophony of campaigning over the following 11 days is unlikely to alter what looks to be a locked-in landslide.

Final campaigning might help decide whether Mr Hatoyama leads a DPJ majority, 240-plus MPs, on to the government benches. That would finally snuff out Japan's "1955 system".

But failing some dramatic blow-up, the first August 30 question seems to have been answered already: the LDP will lose its majority and the DPJ, at least, will have first opportunity to form a coalition government.

Yoshimi Watanabe, who in January quit the Aso ministry and the LDP in disgust, this week promised to put any seats won by his new Minnanoto (Everybody's Party) at the disposal of a DPJ-led coalition.

"As a result," Mr Watanabe said with a grim smile, "I believe my role in regard to the LDP is as a pall-bearer."

It might be a very boisterous funeral.