Saturday, February 28, 2009

DPJAnnounces New Candidate and PNP Is Furious

In a terse thirteen-line report, the hardcopy Yomiuri reports that Ichiro Ozawa held a press conference yesterday to announce that the DPJ had chosen an assistant college professor as the party candidate for Kanagawa First District in the upcoming Lower House election. According to the report, the People’s New Party, which intends to field its own candidate there, is furious and is threatening to dissolve its Upper House alliance with the DPJ. Add this to the deliberate insult that I talked about yesterday, and you have to wonder what kind of game the DPJ is playing.

The last thing that the DPJ wants to do is run an administration where the Social Democratic Party and the PNP each has a de facto Upper House veto. A far more appealing alternative would be a stable coalition with a sizeable, likeminded—whatever that means—bloc of LDP defectors. Ozawa’s actions—the Thursday insult could not have come without his approval—seem to be pointing in that direction. This bears watching.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Would you want to try to rule with the SDP?

Interestingly, this is what the SDP did back in 1989 when it abandoned the other opposition parties it had been coordinating electoral candidates with and went with its own candidates as often as possible. And it worked for them. Ozawa is doing the same.

Jun Okumura said...

Would you want to try to rule with the SDP?...textbook example of a rhetorical question.

Ozawa's certainly making it uncomfortable for DPJ allies. Contrast this with his unwillingness to put up a candidate against newly-independent Yoshimi Watanabe.