Election's Question: What is Reform?
09/08/2005
CNN.com,
TOKYO, Japan (Reuters) -- Japanese voters longing for change but leery of the dangers it might entail are being offered a low-risk option in Sunday's election: vote for the conservative party that has ruled the nation for most of the past 50 years.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who sprang to power in 2001 promising to alter his hide-bound party and fix Japan's stagnant economy, breathed new life into his reformist image when he called the election after ruling party rebels helped defeat bills to privatize the postal system, the core of his agenda.
Opinion polls suggest Koizumi's strategy, encapsulated in his "Don't Stop Reform" slogan and dramatized by his tactic of sending women candidates to challenge the mostly male rebels, has convinced many voters they can have their cake, and eat it too.
"Usually, the choice is the status quo, or change with risk, but Koizumi has managed to present an image of change without risk," said Steven Reed, a political science professor at Chuo University in Tokyo.
"He's stolen the (opposition) Democrats' thunder."
Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) appears to be faring well among uncommitted "floating voters," many of them urban and young, who had previously been swayed by the opposition Democratic Party's argument that only it could enact true reform.
Media surveys published on Sunday showed the LDP, which has been governing in coalition, was headed for a majority on its own. The two ruling parties together could come close to an "absolute stable majority" of 269 in the 480-seat lower house, allowing them to dominate all house committees.
Many analysts say Koizumi's record on economic reform to date has been patchy.
But they agree his decision to refuse the rebels a place on the party slate is shaking up the LDP, for most of its 50-year history a congregation of lawmakers whose job was to distribute wealth to regions and special interest groups.
"I think this will significantly change the LDP," said Ellis Krauss, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego who is in Japan to observe the election.
"He's purged the party of recalcitrant anti-reformers at least in one field, and others will get the message, too."
Beating reform drums
"Reform" has been a big theme in Japanese politics since the early 1990s, when voters became fed up with LDP scandals and worried that Japan's economy was doomed to stagnate.
An anti-LDP coalition that briefly took power in 1993-94 enacted electoral reforms aimed at cleaning up scandal-tainted politics, and tried, less successfully, to deregulate the bureaucratic red-tape critics said was strangling the economy.
Pro-reform politicians who left the LDP eventually gathered with some former socialists in the Democratic Party, which has gained seats in every election since it was formed in 1998.
"The Democratic Party leadership thought they could change Japan by creating a new party," Takafumi Horie, a maverick Internet CEO who is running as a de facto LDP candidate against a heavyweight rebel in western Japan, told a news conference.
"Koizumi tried to do that from within the LDP. He succeeded in staging a coup. His idea was better, he won," added Horie, the CEO of Internet firm Livedoor Co.
Financial markets have been cheered by prospects that a hefty ruling coalition victory would keep Japan on track to slim down the government, reduce public debt, and fix pension and health care systems straining under the burden of an ageing society.
Many analysts note, however, that economic policy is unlikely to switch gears dramatically whoever wins.
"I don't think either party is the party of radical reform," Krauss said. "Both will do evolutionary reform, and in some cases there would be more under the Democrats."
