At least one of my predictions sort of came true: a brief post-election Diet session for purely housekeeping purposes. I say sort of because a couple of minor non-partisan bills submitted by Diet members (bills submitted by the cabinet are far more common and usually more substantial, particularly in their fiscal consequences) are likely to be adopted without going through the usual formalities. The reason for this is that an Upper House majority is difficult to muster on short notice in the aftermath of the election. (My apologies to Climate Morio, who put the question to me here for being so tardy in replying.) And yes, it is increasingly likely that there will be no coalition until the September DPJ election (and for some time after that only case-by-case, floating alliances). However, I’ve changed my mind slightly on Kan’s prospects of remaining in power in that situation. I now he’s more likely to prevail. I’m going over this point, and coalition/alliance prospects, in more detail in a memo that I’m producing for a paying customer. I’ll see if I’ll be able to publicly share at least part of that.
Good thing I avoided making an explicit, last-minute read on the outcome, instead wimping out by referring to media reports. Seriously, I should have paid more attention to the tabloids.
Showing posts with label 2010 HOC election. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2010 HOC election. Show all posts
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Monday, July 12, 2010
Final Thoughts? Really? More Appropriate for Twitter?
The next 24 hours are crucial to the Kan administration’s survival.
Also, an LDPguy candidate is electedreelected in Okinawa. Go figure.
Also, an LDP
Sunday, July 11, 2010
The Tabloids Called It First, Sorta
I have some thoughts about why tabloids are able to report this kind of stuff. Remind me to talk about it later.
I remember walking past a Kiosk a week ago give or take a couple of days and seeing a headline screaming 45 seat debacle for the DPJ. Still, no one in the mainstream media saw an LDP plurality—knock on wood, Sadakazu Tanigaki—coming. Two immediate consequences of the unexpected DPJ loss: a) All policy initiatives are off the table until the September DPJ presidential election and b) the LDP surge and the poor showing by Ozawa’s candidates diminishes the chances of an outright Ozawa-led split. Point b) is what good news there is for Prime Minister Kan. Right now, I think that it will very difficult to cobble together a workable coalition, but I am stunned—and smashed.
One final point (for now): Floater voters trump special interest electoral machines.
Good night y’all.
I remember walking past a Kiosk a week ago give or take a couple of days and seeing a headline screaming 45 seat debacle for the DPJ. Still, no one in the mainstream media saw an LDP plurality—knock on wood, Sadakazu Tanigaki—coming. Two immediate consequences of the unexpected DPJ loss: a) All policy initiatives are off the table until the September DPJ presidential election and b) the LDP surge and the poor showing by Ozawa’s candidates diminishes the chances of an outright Ozawa-led split. Point b) is what good news there is for Prime Minister Kan. Right now, I think that it will very difficult to cobble together a workable coalition, but I am stunned—and smashed.
One final point (for now): Floater voters trump special interest electoral machines.
Good night y’all.
Some Thoughts around the Upper House Election, Plus Shoutout
There are 29 one-seat districts, 12 two-seat districts, 5 three-seat member districts, and 1 five-seat districts*. Several observations:
The two-seat districts are basically a wash between the DPJ and the LDP. No wonder, when a party needs twice the votes of your closest opponent plus a comfortable cushion (unless you could somehow engineer a perfect 1:1 split of the votes, a feat not even the Sokagakkai could accomplish) to take both. Under a two-party system, the two-seat districts matter mostly as a source of votes for the national proportional election, nothing more. And you don’t want to give up a good day job to stand as the non-incumbent on the prefectural ticket unless you can earn a good chance of being placed on the House of Representatives ticket the next time around—or if the incumbent is somehow very vulnerable. Otherwise, you’re little more than a stalking horse for the candidates on the national ticket.
Of the five three-seat districts, three (Chiba, Saitama, and Kanagawa; the others are Aichi and Osaka) are the Kanto prefectures closest to Tokyo. (By contrast, a couple of more distant Kanto prefectures, Tochigi and Gunma, dropped from two seats to one each in the 2007 election. Each of the two now has three Councillors in the Upper House and will drop to two after this election.) Add Tokyo’s five, and we have as good an index of Tokyo-centricity as there is. There are many, often interrelated, reasons for this, but I’d say natural geography (Kanto is huge and relatively flat), the choice of Edo, later Tokyo, as Japan’s capital, and the post-war explosion in public transport are the three major factors.
I mentioned in passing that Gunma and Tochigi Prefectures are being downsized from four seats in the House of Councillors to two through the 2007 and 2010 elections. They talk about overrepresentation of the peripheral in the Diet, particularly in the Upper House, where each prefecture must be represented by at least one member per triennial election. But the Gunma and Tochigi examples show that the one per election requirement can create wrenching changes in representation in the peripheral as well. What will the prefectural districts look like in twenty years under current rules if current demographic trends continue? The DPJ and LDP are in an unspoken conspiracy to shake out the smaller parties in the name of sacrifice by the political class by cutting back on the national proportional seats. I don’t have a position on that, but I think that a revision of the a-seat-in-every-election rule should come first. More fundamentally, the place of prefectures in the Japanese body politics needs to be revisited.
I went and cast my two typical floater ballots today, which may account for my unusually prescriptive comments today. I took along an American political scientist along for a look-see and had a long conversation with him after that, which may also be affecting me. Incidentally, the election officials were nice about the presence of an uninvited observer, but did not allow the academic to take photos. And the guy—the professor, not the election official—wants to see you, Jake, before he goes back to the States. Hope you can find the time for him. Hope you come Friday too.
* I am using the conventional and convenient terminology that refers to the number of Upper House seats that are up for election every three years in each prefecture, and not the actual number of seats allocated to the prefecture, which is double that number. This is significant, as we shall see later.The last surveys showed the DPJ dominating in the one-seat districts to the northeast and the LDP prevailing in the southwest. The historical contrast between the poorer, more radical north and the wealthier, more conservative south continues to resonate in the battle between the two top vote-getters. Not that I’m ready to read anything of long-term significance into this, but I do know that I have to rethink my comment about the periphery.
The two-seat districts are basically a wash between the DPJ and the LDP. No wonder, when a party needs twice the votes of your closest opponent plus a comfortable cushion (unless you could somehow engineer a perfect 1:1 split of the votes, a feat not even the Sokagakkai could accomplish) to take both. Under a two-party system, the two-seat districts matter mostly as a source of votes for the national proportional election, nothing more. And you don’t want to give up a good day job to stand as the non-incumbent on the prefectural ticket unless you can earn a good chance of being placed on the House of Representatives ticket the next time around—or if the incumbent is somehow very vulnerable. Otherwise, you’re little more than a stalking horse for the candidates on the national ticket.
Of the five three-seat districts, three (Chiba, Saitama, and Kanagawa; the others are Aichi and Osaka) are the Kanto prefectures closest to Tokyo. (By contrast, a couple of more distant Kanto prefectures, Tochigi and Gunma, dropped from two seats to one each in the 2007 election. Each of the two now has three Councillors in the Upper House and will drop to two after this election.) Add Tokyo’s five, and we have as good an index of Tokyo-centricity as there is. There are many, often interrelated, reasons for this, but I’d say natural geography (Kanto is huge and relatively flat), the choice of Edo, later Tokyo, as Japan’s capital, and the post-war explosion in public transport are the three major factors.
I mentioned in passing that Gunma and Tochigi Prefectures are being downsized from four seats in the House of Councillors to two through the 2007 and 2010 elections. They talk about overrepresentation of the peripheral in the Diet, particularly in the Upper House, where each prefecture must be represented by at least one member per triennial election. But the Gunma and Tochigi examples show that the one per election requirement can create wrenching changes in representation in the peripheral as well. What will the prefectural districts look like in twenty years under current rules if current demographic trends continue? The DPJ and LDP are in an unspoken conspiracy to shake out the smaller parties in the name of sacrifice by the political class by cutting back on the national proportional seats. I don’t have a position on that, but I think that a revision of the a-seat-in-every-election rule should come first. More fundamentally, the place of prefectures in the Japanese body politics needs to be revisited.
I went and cast my two typical floater ballots today, which may account for my unusually prescriptive comments today. I took along an American political scientist along for a look-see and had a long conversation with him after that, which may also be affecting me. Incidentally, the election officials were nice about the presence of an uninvited observer, but did not allow the academic to take photos. And the guy—the professor, not the election official—wants to see you, Jake, before he goes back to the States. Hope you can find the time for him. Hope you come Friday too.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Why Is the DPJ Catching All the Flak on the Consumption Tax Hike Issue?
Here is my response, rearticulated as a blogpost, to an issue raised on an Upper House election-themed mailing list.
It actually overlaps with yesterday’s post. Namely: Why is the Japanese electorate, according to the Japanese media, taking it out on the DPJ for Prime Minister Kan’s enthusiasm for a consumption tax hike, but not on the LDP, who broached the subject in the first place by putting a five percentage point hike in its election manifesto? Well, the LDP isn’t exactly gaining traction as far as overall voter sentiment is concerned—it’s the single-seat races where it’s surging in the surveys*—and I’m not a mind reader and do not have the benefit of a newspaper or grant to cover the costs of a survey, but here are a few observations/conjectures.
First, higher taxes are never popular, so there’ll be a temptation to shoot the messenger under the best of circumstances. In fact, the consumption tax in its various permutations has been the third rail of Japanese politics since the days of Prime Minister Ohira, so it would have been doubly prudent to have crafted a game plan before touching it. Instead, Prime Minister Kan threw out ideas about the tax rate, timeline, and exemptions as if he were engaged in a brainstorming session. We saw another case of analogous, if far more trivial, competence issues causing damage to the Fukuda administration during the rollout of the Late-Term Medical Case Insurance system.
Second, there’s the arithmetic. Which is more likely, pro-tax hike people who were inclined to vote for the LDP changing their minds and opting for the DPJ because Kan got religion, or anti-tax folks abandoning the DPJ and voting for a third party or abstaining altogether?
Third, this election is a referendum on the DPJ, not the LDP. The LDP would like to have as many of those floater voters coming its way as possible, but it’ll be okay if they stay away come 11 July or even throw in their lot to Your Party, as long as they don’t put the names of DPJ candidates on their prefectural district ballots.
What’s interesting is that the outcome—assuming the media surveys are correct—will make the LDP more of a party of the peripheral. That’s the other side of winning in the singe-seaters. Given demographic trends, i.e. concentration in the large metropolitan areas, which will continue to be reflected in the periodic census-based reallocation, it can’t be happy about that, as I’ve mentioned before.
It actually overlaps with yesterday’s post. Namely: Why is the Japanese electorate, according to the Japanese media, taking it out on the DPJ for Prime Minister Kan’s enthusiasm for a consumption tax hike, but not on the LDP, who broached the subject in the first place by putting a five percentage point hike in its election manifesto? Well, the LDP isn’t exactly gaining traction as far as overall voter sentiment is concerned—it’s the single-seat races where it’s surging in the surveys*—and I’m not a mind reader and do not have the benefit of a newspaper or grant to cover the costs of a survey, but here are a few observations/conjectures.
First, higher taxes are never popular, so there’ll be a temptation to shoot the messenger under the best of circumstances. In fact, the consumption tax in its various permutations has been the third rail of Japanese politics since the days of Prime Minister Ohira, so it would have been doubly prudent to have crafted a game plan before touching it. Instead, Prime Minister Kan threw out ideas about the tax rate, timeline, and exemptions as if he were engaged in a brainstorming session. We saw another case of analogous, if far more trivial, competence issues causing damage to the Fukuda administration during the rollout of the Late-Term Medical Case Insurance system.
Second, there’s the arithmetic. Which is more likely, pro-tax hike people who were inclined to vote for the LDP changing their minds and opting for the DPJ because Kan got religion, or anti-tax folks abandoning the DPJ and voting for a third party or abstaining altogether?
Third, this election is a referendum on the DPJ, not the LDP. The LDP would like to have as many of those floater voters coming its way as possible, but it’ll be okay if they stay away come 11 July or even throw in their lot to Your Party, as long as they don’t put the names of DPJ candidates on their prefectural district ballots.
What’s interesting is that the outcome—assuming the media surveys are correct—will make the LDP more of a party of the peripheral. That’s the other side of winning in the singe-seaters. Given demographic trends, i.e. concentration in the large metropolitan areas, which will continue to be reflected in the periodic census-based reallocation, it can’t be happy about that, as I’ve mentioned before.
* There’s a pattern here that highlights the north-east/south-west political divide. I can’t say more about this now since I don’t want to give away anything that Aurelia George Mulgan might be posting later on the SSJ Forum (it’s a useful site, I recommend that you subscribe if you aren’t subscribed already) regarding an interesting finding of hers.
Friday, July 09, 2010
Some More Thoughts on the DPJ Slippage. Plus, a Kan Story
The flap over Shizuka Kamei’s resignation from his cabinet post in protest over the Kan administration’s decision not to pass the postal reform bills during the regular Diet session* did not help. But mostly, it appears to be Prime Minister Kan’s handling of the consumption tax issue that is responsible for the precipitous fall in the DPJ’s electoral fortunes.
Coalition partners? The LDP? Ozawa came close to engineering a grand coalition in 2007 after the Upper House election that year. But is the cabinet large enough to share? Would the LDP want to? Both Komeito and most likely Your Party will each have enough seats to bridge the gap without the PNP’s help—good-bye postal reform bills?—but it will be a hard sell right after the Upper House election. Komeito is better equipped to enter a coalition, as I’ve explained here before, but media reports on the campaigning tell us that there has been substantial Komeito-LDP cooperation going on at the prefecture-chapter level.
I suspect that it’s going to take time to craft a stable DPJ-led regime. In the meantime, the extraordinary Diet session right after the election is likely to be limited to taking care of housekeeping matter such as committee assignments, so the postal reform bills will have to wait, perhaps substantially reengineered. And if all the opposition parties hold out long enough, Kan will be very vulnerable in the September election for the DPJ presidency.
Finally, an anecdote from Professor Hamada’s talk. During the Q&A, Kazuyo Katsuma, a do-it-all consultant (from personal finance to management and everything in between) and high-profile talking head, claimed that she briefed Kan and found that he didn’t know the difference between nominal and real interest rates. This comes on the heels of another piece of information that I gathered last previous week. During a conversation only tangentially related to the Kan administration, an unimpeachable source told me that Kan hadn’t known about the multiplier effect when he became Finance Minister. For someone with such limited economic literacy—RS tells me that Dick Cheney for one showed similar ignorance as Vice President, which I guess should be reassuring—Kan shows uncommon conviction in the righteousness of his big government approach.
Addendum: Anonymous reminds me that the multiplier mishap Finance Minister is “very old news.” So true.
* The DPJ’s promise to do it ASAP when the Diet reconvenes after the election and Kamei’s replacement by his PNP cohort Shozaburo Jimi give the impression that it was more of a pre-election stunt than a show of genuine dismay.Three days ago, on our way home from a talk given by the esteemed Professor Koichi Hamada, a journalist raised the question: If the majority of the Japanese public favors a consumption tax hike, why were Kan and the DPJ catching so much flak? My short answer in essence was that they alienated the entire anti-hike crowd while they had to share support from the pro-hike folks with the LDP, so they ended up getting bad marks from a majority of the whole*. That’s broadly what the subsequent polls are revealing in painful (to the DPJ) detail. And it’s also true that the consumption tax has always been the third rail of Japanese politics—just ask Prime Ministers Ohira, Nakasone, Takeshita, Hosokawa, and Hashimoto. There was the added stigma of the DPJ’s failure to come up with the massive savings that it had appeared to promise the Japanese electorate in the 2009 election. So there were caution lights everywhere calling for a very careful rollout plan. Instead, he seems to have had only the haziest of game plans if any, tossing out ideas about tax rates and timelines and exemptions as if he was engaging in a brainstorming session.
* So I can’t understand what we’re hearing from the media, that Kan and his associates intended to take away the issue from the LDP, which is advocating a 5 percentage point hike, to 10%. This isn’t rocket science; it’s really simple fractions.One other takeaway: If the election plays out like the media surveys say that it’s trending, the DPJ will have to add a half dozen seats or so after the election for a simple majority (and, for a coalition majority, make up for the loss of two, perhaps all three, PNP seats at stake). Finding LDP defectors is the preferred option, but the low-hanging fruit have already been picked. One or two more perhaps, but half a dozen? That looks like part of a broader realignment, and only the DPJ can kick-start that process. The big bang, of course, is Ozawa’s game, but so is cherry picking. Kan and his team do not have the contacts and the expertise.
Coalition partners? The LDP? Ozawa came close to engineering a grand coalition in 2007 after the Upper House election that year. But is the cabinet large enough to share? Would the LDP want to? Both Komeito and most likely Your Party will each have enough seats to bridge the gap without the PNP’s help—good-bye postal reform bills?—but it will be a hard sell right after the Upper House election. Komeito is better equipped to enter a coalition, as I’ve explained here before, but media reports on the campaigning tell us that there has been substantial Komeito-LDP cooperation going on at the prefecture-chapter level.
I suspect that it’s going to take time to craft a stable DPJ-led regime. In the meantime, the extraordinary Diet session right after the election is likely to be limited to taking care of housekeeping matter such as committee assignments, so the postal reform bills will have to wait, perhaps substantially reengineered. And if all the opposition parties hold out long enough, Kan will be very vulnerable in the September election for the DPJ presidency.
Finally, an anecdote from Professor Hamada’s talk. During the Q&A, Kazuyo Katsuma, a do-it-all consultant (from personal finance to management and everything in between) and high-profile talking head, claimed that she briefed Kan and found that he didn’t know the difference between nominal and real interest rates. This comes on the heels of another piece of information that I gathered last previous week. During a conversation only tangentially related to the Kan administration, an unimpeachable source told me that Kan hadn’t known about the multiplier effect when he became Finance Minister. For someone with such limited economic literacy—RS tells me that Dick Cheney for one showed similar ignorance as Vice President, which I guess should be reassuring—Kan shows uncommon conviction in the righteousness of his big government approach.
Addendum: Anonymous reminds me that the multiplier mishap Finance Minister is “very old news.” So true.
DPJ Slipping, LDP Entrenching Itself on the Periphery
The most recent media surveys (6-8 July; polls and legwork) on the 11 July Upper House election put the DPJ around 50 and the LDP in the mid 40s. The DPJ continues to kick ass in the national proportional ballot, but the LDP is coming on strong in the prefectural districts. Specifically, it’s the one-seaters. Sankei’s 7 July district-by-district survey has the DPJ and LDP leading in 9 and 16 respectively, and the two neck-and-neck in 4. The LDP is becoming the party of the peripheral, of ura-Nihon—don’t use this word in polite company, it has been politically incorrect for some years—Shikoku, and Kyushu (it even leads in Okinawa).
If this trend will plays itself out on 11 July—there still are a lot of undecideds out there, though that factor has to be discounted by the prospects of their sitting it out—there will be a multitude of implications, short-term and long-, politics and policy, that require analysis. A lot of work to do.
If this trend will plays itself out on 11 July—there still are a lot of undecideds out there, though that factor has to be discounted by the prospects of their sitting it out—there will be a multitude of implications, short-term and long-, politics and policy, that require analysis. A lot of work to do.
Monday, July 05, 2010
The Upper House Election and Some Political Implications
If media reports on the upcoming Upper House election are to be believed, the DPJ is sure to post some gains but is likely to fall short of an outright majority. Media estimates based on proprietary polls and old-fashioned legwork suggest that the DPJ will do well in the national proportional ballot but will not achieve the near-sweep that it made in the 29 one-seat (per election, every three years) districts in the 2007 provincial ballots. The lack of an outright majority not only will have a significant impact on policy issues but will also likely affect the political game; Prime Minister Kan needs an outright DPJ majority to make sure that Ichiro Ozawa does not attempt to engineer a DPJ split and a broader, parliamentarian realignment around the September election for the DPJ leadership.
The same estimates indicate that the LDP will more or less break even in the national proportional ballot (12 seats up for reelection) but will claw back some seats in the one-seat districts. This will make it lean even more heavily towards provincial interests, which is not where you want to bet the future of your political viability as a national party. Your Party is likely to place a distant third and will represent free-market reformist interests in the march to the next Lower House election, to be held no later than 2013.
The SDP and PNP will wind up losing most of their leverage over the DPJ. Specifically, the SDP will end up continuing its slow but inexorable slide to oblivion, picking up 1—with great luck 2—seats (3 seats up for reelection). Every time that the 1955 Socialists cozied up to the powers that be, they have lost that much more of their political cachet as the safe haven for the protest vote; this election looks to be no exception. I suspect that we’ve seen the last of the SDP as a member of any coalition government. The PNP has three incumbents whose terms end this year, two in prefectural districts and one proportional; it is likely to end up with none. (It does have three seats, up for election in 2013.) That’ll be two more seats that the DPJ will have to cover just to maintain a coalition majority. More significantly, the roar of the postal-office electoral machine appears to be mightier than its bite. Is it really worth catering to at the expense of alienating floater voters?
Last but not least, on what is likely to be a slightly diminished Komeito. Barring an outright DPJ majority—still a real possibility—expect a draen out courtship of the Komeito by the DPJ to forge a manageable coalition—first base, second base...
Incidentally, I find it interesting if not surprising that the two most obvious causes of Hatoyama’s fall—Futenma Air Station and the political financing scandals—figure very little in the election. Instead, it appears to be Kan’s handling of the consumption tax—the casualness with which he has been throwing words around regarding tax rates, exemptions and rebates—that has been the biggest drag on the DPJ. Careless words regarding a make-or-break policy question, plus the embarrassment over Kamei’s fit and resignation over the postponement of the postal reform bills to the post-election Diet session, and you have a situation looking somewhat like that under Prime Minister Hatoyama.
The same estimates indicate that the LDP will more or less break even in the national proportional ballot (12 seats up for reelection) but will claw back some seats in the one-seat districts. This will make it lean even more heavily towards provincial interests, which is not where you want to bet the future of your political viability as a national party. Your Party is likely to place a distant third and will represent free-market reformist interests in the march to the next Lower House election, to be held no later than 2013.
The SDP and PNP will wind up losing most of their leverage over the DPJ. Specifically, the SDP will end up continuing its slow but inexorable slide to oblivion, picking up 1—with great luck 2—seats (3 seats up for reelection). Every time that the 1955 Socialists cozied up to the powers that be, they have lost that much more of their political cachet as the safe haven for the protest vote; this election looks to be no exception. I suspect that we’ve seen the last of the SDP as a member of any coalition government. The PNP has three incumbents whose terms end this year, two in prefectural districts and one proportional; it is likely to end up with none. (It does have three seats, up for election in 2013.) That’ll be two more seats that the DPJ will have to cover just to maintain a coalition majority. More significantly, the roar of the postal-office electoral machine appears to be mightier than its bite. Is it really worth catering to at the expense of alienating floater voters?
Last but not least, on what is likely to be a slightly diminished Komeito. Barring an outright DPJ majority—still a real possibility—expect a draen out courtship of the Komeito by the DPJ to forge a manageable coalition—first base, second base...
Incidentally, I find it interesting if not surprising that the two most obvious causes of Hatoyama’s fall—Futenma Air Station and the political financing scandals—figure very little in the election. Instead, it appears to be Kan’s handling of the consumption tax—the casualness with which he has been throwing words around regarding tax rates, exemptions and rebates—that has been the biggest drag on the DPJ. Careless words regarding a make-or-break policy question, plus the embarrassment over Kamei’s fit and resignation over the postponement of the postal reform bills to the post-election Diet session, and you have a situation looking somewhat like that under Prime Minister Hatoyama.
Will the DPJ win a simple majority in the Upper House in the July 11 Upper House election?
Will the DPJ win a simple majority in the Upper House in the July 11 Upper House election? This is a very important for policymaking because a bicameral majority will enable the DPJ to 1) pass any bill short of a constitutional amendment on its own and, just as significant politically, 2) claim a renewed mandate from the electorate. It will also help snuff out any prospects of a September rebellion by Ichiro Ozawa and his minions. The media reports suggest that a simple majority is unlikely, but a couple of people whose reading of the political winds I respect say otherwise, so keep an open mind about it. In the meantime…
The eventual outcome turns on the extent to which a) undecided voters will break for the DPJ in the two-seat (one elected every three years to a six-year term) provincial districts and b) Sokagakkai voters help LDP candidates there.
On the first point, the most recent media polls show the DPJ trailing the LDP in convincing its “supporters” to actually vote for it. Given what must be the relative softness of this support and the presence of Your Party as the New Charice, this indicates the DPJ’s difficulty in convincing large numbers of undecided floater voters to opt for its candidates on the provincial ballot. The voting procedure does not help the DPJ if I remember correctly. First, the voter receives the national proportional ballot, in which he must write in the name of a party or a specific candidate. (Japan for all practical purposes has a literacy test.) After he puts the ballot in the ballot box, he receives another ballot on which he is expected to write the name of his choice from the list of provincial district candidates. Most two-seat districts will be contested between DPJ and LDP candidates, but there will be other candidates, Communist and otherwise, available. Specifically, I have a hard time imagining many people explicitly voting against the DPJ on the proportional ballot then turning around and choosing the DPJ candidate on the provincial ballot. My guess is that the average voter would behave differently if the ballots were given out in the opposite order. (This is something that could be confirmed in a behavioral psychology experiment. Any takers?)
Addendum 6 July: I was dead wrong on the voting order, as you will see if you go through the comments. That said, the importance of choice architecture (a term that I just learned a few days ago) in this election should be explored by a combination of exit polls and controlled experiments.
On the second point, media reports show in a large number of provincial districts 6/10th of Komeito supporters leaning towards LDP candidates. Some remain at 5/10th while others reach 7/10th and 8/10th. (There is one district in which it only reaches 2/10th, a sign of some very bad history, no doubt.) The LDP-Komeito coalition is battered, but is obviously not dead.
The eventual outcome turns on the extent to which a) undecided voters will break for the DPJ in the two-seat (one elected every three years to a six-year term) provincial districts and b) Sokagakkai voters help LDP candidates there.
On the first point, the most recent media polls show the DPJ trailing the LDP in convincing its “supporters” to actually vote for it. Given what must be the relative softness of this support and the presence of Your Party as the New Charice, this indicates the DPJ’s difficulty in convincing large numbers of undecided floater voters to opt for its candidates on the provincial ballot. The voting procedure does not help the DPJ if I remember correctly. First, the voter receives the national proportional ballot, in which he must write in the name of a party or a specific candidate. (Japan for all practical purposes has a literacy test.) After he puts the ballot in the ballot box, he receives another ballot on which he is expected to write the name of his choice from the list of provincial district candidates. Most two-seat districts will be contested between DPJ and LDP candidates, but there will be other candidates, Communist and otherwise, available. Specifically, I have a hard time imagining many people explicitly voting against the DPJ on the proportional ballot then turning around and choosing the DPJ candidate on the provincial ballot. My guess is that the average voter would behave differently if the ballots were given out in the opposite order. (This is something that could be confirmed in a behavioral psychology experiment. Any takers?)
Addendum 6 July: I was dead wrong on the voting order, as you will see if you go through the comments. That said, the importance of choice architecture (a term that I just learned a few days ago) in this election should be explored by a combination of exit polls and controlled experiments.
On the second point, media reports show in a large number of provincial districts 6/10th of Komeito supporters leaning towards LDP candidates. Some remain at 5/10th while others reach 7/10th and 8/10th. (There is one district in which it only reaches 2/10th, a sign of some very bad history, no doubt.) The LDP-Komeito coalition is battered, but is obviously not dead.
Saturday, June 05, 2010
Koshiishi to Ozawa, No Hard Feelings, Just Business?
New Prime Minister Naoto Kan quickly moved to sideline Ichiro Ozawa, political regent to nominal DPJ head Yukio Hatoyama, first verbally with a barb telling him to lay quiet for a while, then naming Yukio Edano, Ozawa’s archenemy, to replace the latter as secretary-general. (As secretary-general, Ozawa had controlled the DPJ purse strings and party appointments.) The nomination of Yoshito Sengoku as Chief Cabinet Secretary could not have pleased Ozawa either. These maneuvers led to news reports about Ozawa and his associates issuing veiled threats to challenge Kan in the September DPJ presidency election—Kan is serving out the remainder of Haotyama’s term, which in turn was the remainder of Ozawa’s original two-year term. But if this Sankei report is correct, Azuma Koshiishi, an abrasive 74 year-old former Nikkyoso leader and head of the Upper House DPJ, is having none of it, warning that an “engaging in something that looks like an internal battle and we would never gain the trust of the people.” Koshiishi had been one of Ozawa’s closest associates as his DPJ second-in-command and frequent go-to guy for dropping the hammer, but he’s standing up for his people (and himself; he faces a competitive election for his Upper House seat), and his people are in the Upper House. It reminds you of the Era of the Warlords.
I’ve been telling people that Ozawa doesn’t have relationships, he has alliances. In fact, I’ll be surprised if he is able to take a hundred Diet members with him in a formal split. I think that the 140-150 Diet member count for a hypothetical Ozawa group is one that has been greatly inflated by the December trip to China, when he took a large number of the rookies with him. I assume that most of the “Ozawa Children” hate that nickname. These are grown men and women, most of whom had enjoyed success in their respective professions, which they’d put on hold or dropped to place a bet.
I’ve been telling people that Ozawa doesn’t have relationships, he has alliances. In fact, I’ll be surprised if he is able to take a hundred Diet members with him in a formal split. I think that the 140-150 Diet member count for a hypothetical Ozawa group is one that has been greatly inflated by the December trip to China, when he took a large number of the rookies with him. I assume that most of the “Ozawa Children” hate that nickname. These are grown men and women, most of whom had enjoyed success in their respective professions, which they’d put on hold or dropped to place a bet.
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
Will the Prime Minister Take Last Orders?
A couple of stories on the Sankei website here and here. In the first one, cabinet ministers including Naoto and Kazuhiro Haraguchi, the most likely candidates as Hatoyama’s replacement, line up behind the prime minister in support. Well, what else could these people, handpicked by Hatoyama himself, say when accosted by reporters, right? But it is a useful reminder that the business of government goes on, even while people like me speculate on the political game for fun and (modest) profit. And Hatoyama is indicating in his typically roundabout way that he intends to soldier on. The second one has Azuma Koshiishi reassuring the harried DPJ leadership that he (and Ozawa?) will resolve the problem within a couple of days.
So what happens when the hard-to-resist force meets the hard-to-move object? How about a lame-pigeon prime minister finishing up the legislative agenda in the next two weeks, then a DPJ presidential election immediately after the Diet session ends, and fighting the election under the new president, who would be elected prime minister in the post-election extraordinary Diet session?
So what happens when the hard-to-resist force meets the hard-to-move object? How about a lame-pigeon prime minister finishing up the legislative agenda in the next two weeks, then a DPJ presidential election immediately after the Diet session ends, and fighting the election under the new president, who would be elected prime minister in the post-election extraordinary Diet session?
Dead Man Walking; What I think It Means
Veiled grumbling and anonymous comments in the DPJ trying to wish away Prime Minister Hatoyama are quickly shifting to open calls to do the right thing. Two things coming together over the weekend, 1) the DPJ’s Sunday withdrawal from the three-party coalition and 2) the Monday publication of the weekend media polls that put the LDP ahead of or neck-and-neck with the DPJ for voter intent in the July upper house election, have emboldened the DPJ’s upper house leaders and members up for reelection to speak up. Later on Monday, Hatoyama huddled with Ozawa and his upper house right-hand man Azuma Koshiishi but failed to secure their immediate endorsement. The media appear to be reading this as open season on Hatoyama in the DPJ. The three will meet again today at Hatoyama’s request. In the mean time, a gathering of the DPJ leadership (with Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano sitting in on behalf of the prime minister) reportedly delegated the resolution of the matter to Ozawa and Koshiishi. All I can say to this sequence of events is that in the political game, the end comes swiftly once it becomes inevitable.
So it’s going to happen not after (as I had thought more likely) but before the July election. Ozawa’s immediate concerns should be the following:
1) Keep his DPJ secretary-general post. Ozawa is not one to inspire widespread loyalty. His powers of persuasion depend directly on his power to reward and punish. This means that he must force Hatoyama to resign “voluntarily” so that he can weather inevitable demands for his own resignation that will emanate from the media. Note also that an unwilling Hatoyama would try to take Ozawa with him, possibly by relieving him of his SG post (on which point the DPJ charter is vague).
2) Pass two legislative bills, one on the Japan Post reform process and another to tighten restrictions on the worker dispatching business. They’ve cleared the lower house and have been sent to the upper house. That will be the bottom line for the SDP when it decides how far to go in maintaining its collaboration with the DPJ in the July election. They are also necessary—the JP legislation in particular—to keep the PNP in the fold as its remaining coalition partner.
3) Keep the Diet session as short as possible. The current Diet session ends in a little over two weeks (on 16 June) and the selection of a new DPJ president and his election as the new prime minister is likely to take a week out of that. An extension looks inevitable but the DPJ wants to keep it to the absolute minimum necessary in order to avoid giving the opposition opportunities to draw media attention to DPJ shortcomings. From Ozawa’s viewpoint, renewed calls to investigate his political financing issues (if, as I expect, he retains his DPJ SG position) would be an obvious and highly undesirable ploy. This all means that many of the legislative bills submitted by the Hatoyama cabinet will be deferred to post-election sessions or allowed to expire.
Until I saw the latest media polls, I had been skeptical of past DPJ leaks about private polls—closely held to the vest by Ozawa—showing DPJ returns at 30-35, 35-40 seats. I thought at the time that they were an Ozawa gambit designed to force the DPJ candidates and rank-and-file to double down. My guesstimate at the time was 40-50 seats and, if pressed to narrow the range, 45-50. Not after the polls. But if Hatoyama’s successor is picked from among the likely prospects—Naoto Kan, Kan, Kan, and Kazuhiro Haraguchi—I’m reconfirming my guesstimate. And no, I don’t think Katsuya Okada makes the short list; he’s not Ozawa’s choice, and he’s also tainted by his role in the Futenma affair. Spending so much time and effort on the Japan-US secret agreements didn’t help him either. Seiji Maehara? I don’t see how Ozawa can ever swallow this one. Also, there’s an outside chance that JAL will blow up in his face as early as before the election.
So it’s going to happen not after (as I had thought more likely) but before the July election. Ozawa’s immediate concerns should be the following:
1) Keep his DPJ secretary-general post. Ozawa is not one to inspire widespread loyalty. His powers of persuasion depend directly on his power to reward and punish. This means that he must force Hatoyama to resign “voluntarily” so that he can weather inevitable demands for his own resignation that will emanate from the media. Note also that an unwilling Hatoyama would try to take Ozawa with him, possibly by relieving him of his SG post (on which point the DPJ charter is vague).
2) Pass two legislative bills, one on the Japan Post reform process and another to tighten restrictions on the worker dispatching business. They’ve cleared the lower house and have been sent to the upper house. That will be the bottom line for the SDP when it decides how far to go in maintaining its collaboration with the DPJ in the July election. They are also necessary—the JP legislation in particular—to keep the PNP in the fold as its remaining coalition partner.
3) Keep the Diet session as short as possible. The current Diet session ends in a little over two weeks (on 16 June) and the selection of a new DPJ president and his election as the new prime minister is likely to take a week out of that. An extension looks inevitable but the DPJ wants to keep it to the absolute minimum necessary in order to avoid giving the opposition opportunities to draw media attention to DPJ shortcomings. From Ozawa’s viewpoint, renewed calls to investigate his political financing issues (if, as I expect, he retains his DPJ SG position) would be an obvious and highly undesirable ploy. This all means that many of the legislative bills submitted by the Hatoyama cabinet will be deferred to post-election sessions or allowed to expire.
Until I saw the latest media polls, I had been skeptical of past DPJ leaks about private polls—closely held to the vest by Ozawa—showing DPJ returns at 30-35, 35-40 seats. I thought at the time that they were an Ozawa gambit designed to force the DPJ candidates and rank-and-file to double down. My guesstimate at the time was 40-50 seats and, if pressed to narrow the range, 45-50. Not after the polls. But if Hatoyama’s successor is picked from among the likely prospects—Naoto Kan, Kan, Kan, and Kazuhiro Haraguchi—I’m reconfirming my guesstimate. And no, I don’t think Katsuya Okada makes the short list; he’s not Ozawa’s choice, and he’s also tainted by his role in the Futenma affair. Spending so much time and effort on the Japan-US secret agreements didn’t help him either. Seiji Maehara? I don’t see how Ozawa can ever swallow this one. Also, there’s an outside chance that JAL will blow up in his face as early as before the election.
Monday, May 31, 2010
The Danse Macabre around the Prime Minister
This Yomiuri report citing DPJ upper house DPJ leaders, where Ozawa’s influence is greatest, throwing out feelers to Hatoyama to fall on his sword* and this report on Hatoyama’s own account about how he reaffirmed the support from Ozawa and his upper house confederate Koshiishi are as good as any other if you want to understand the game. Basically, Ozawa is trying to get Hatoyama out of the way without having to leave the scene himself. Ozawa can’t confront Hatoyama directly because the prime minister would then take Ozawa out with him, so he’s using his deputies to try to induce Hatoyama to give up the ghost. So I guess my question is: Is Hatoyama smart enough to take a hint?
This is, of course, just me and my thumb talkin’.
This is, of course, just me and my thumb talkin’.
* Goshi Hosono—lower house member, former policy wonk and latest Ozawa favorite—repeatedly made more or less the same insinuation on a Sunday talk show.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Coalition Update: Officially Dissolved but Collaboration in July Election Still in the Cards
The SDP meeting of its prefectural chapter director-generals in a near-unanimous decision—the Niigata and Oita chapter DGs dissented, go figure—Sunday afternoon to opted to officially leave the three-party alliance supporting the Hatoyama administration but to seek to continue to cooperate with the DPJ in the July upper house election. This makes tactical sense but is likely to be pillaged by the MSM (except tabloid Nikkai Gendai). I don’t think that it’s a good idea if the SDP wants to survive as an anti-business, anti-Japan-US alliance protest party. But maybe that’s just me.
What about the Lower House? The SDP Revisited
Yesterday, when I looked at what the coalition meant to the SDP, I went to bed without going into the implications for the next lower house election, which would come no later than August 2013, most likely as part of a bicameral election, that is, in tandem with the election for the other half of the upper house. That won’t do. After all, the SDP does hold 7 lower house seats, two (wrong, it’s three; see blooper alert at the end of the main body of this post) of which hold down first-past-the-post, single-seat districts. Isn’t it likely that the SDP will lose the FPP seats if the DPJ not only withdraws its support but also fields its own candidate?* The short answer? It’s complicated.
The DPJ’s two FPP lower house seats are held by Kantoku Teruya in the Okinawa Prefecture 2nd District and Yasumasa Shigeno in the Oita Prefecture 2nd District. Of the two, Teruya’s seat is more likely to remain with the DPJ if it leaves the coalition. Shigeno’s situation is harder to read, but it’s not clear that the SDP will be better off here if it remains in the coalition.
Teruya was first elected as an anti-military independent to national office in 1995 to the upper house for the single seat that was up for election that year in two-seat Okinawa. He yielded his position as the anti-military candidate in the 2004 upper house election to Keiko Itokazu (who easily defeated the LDP candidate), but returned to the Diet as the lower house member from the Okinawa Prefecture 2nd District as a member of the SDP. He was reelected in 2005—when the DPJ candidate finished a near-fringe candidate third behind the LDP also-ran—and 2009. Through all this, he has also enjoyed the support of the Okinawa Social Mass Party, which has drifted to the left over the years as it lost a good portion of its support base to the LDP and DPJ. My guess is that he will be more helped than harmed by a DPJ challenger, who would only wind up as a spoilsport for the LDP candidate by splitting the pro-military vote. On the other hand, if the DPJ remains in the coalition, Teruya may bolt the SDP and run as an independent in the next lower house election, which would be the surest way for the DPJ to lose that seat.
Shigeno’s situation is different. A dyed-in-the-wool SDP member who worked his way up the prefectural civil service labor union ladder, then turned to politics fulltime, serving as a prefectural assemblyman for 26 years, and winning a national office in the 2000 lower house election as a regional proportional candidate. (He ran simultaneously in the Oita Prefecture 2nd District, where he lost to Seishiro Eto, the LDP incumbent.) His subsequent track record: (2003) FPP loss, regional loss; (2005) FPP loss, regional win; (2009) FPP win—finally beating Eto in a close race. Shigeno had been gaining votes in each election even before the historical alliance in the 2009 election, so it’s not a given that he will lose his FPP seat—possibly against a rookie if Eto, 72 by the time a 2013 election rolls around—if he DPJ withdraws its support, in which case, he will still have an excellent chance of making it back on the SDP’s regional proportional ticket. On the other hand, he is not a shoo-in even if the SDP stays in the coalition, given that Eto managed to run a close second in an election that turned out to be a disaster for the LDP overall.
To sum it up, if the SDP remains in the coalition, it may lose the Okinawa FPP seat through defection while the Oita FPP seat is not a sure thing even with DPJ support. If the SDP leaves the coalition, it is highly likely to retain the Okinawa FPP seat while there is a good chance that it will lose the Oita FPP seat.
The SDP is not, or course, a single-issue party, and many things can happen between now and whenever. But the impact of a withdrawal from the coalition on the SDP’s FPP seats is ambiguous at worst. Given the predictable, immediate fallout on the upper house proportional ballot and its reputation as a party of principle/protest as well as the institutional memory of the disaster that the 1994-1995 cohabitation under Tomiichi Murayama turned out to be, I have to put my money on a formal split.
And I’ll know soon enough if I’m wrong.
Addendum (blooper alert): Anonymous reminds me in the comments that Kiyomi Tsujimoto made it through in the Osaka 10th District. Thanks. That also provides a good motive for Tsujimoto’s reluctance to speak out against Hatoyama after Fukushima resigned. The SDP will most likely have to kiss her seat goodbye if the DPJ decides to field its own candidate there, meaning that she would have to take up the 1 seat that the DPJ will win in the 29-seat Kinki region proportional district. Add this long-term outlook to the threat of a second DPJ upper house candidate in the Niigata Prefectural District and a collaborative relationship on an issue-by-issue basis becomes attractive from a purely electoral point of view. After all, the SDP should be able to maintain its 2 upper house proportional seats even if its share of the national vote falls to 3%. Whether the SDP activists will accept this line of reasoning—if indeed the SDP leadership iss thinking along these lines—is another matter altogether. And that’s about as far as my arithmetic takes me.
The DPJ’s two FPP lower house seats are held by Kantoku Teruya in the Okinawa Prefecture 2nd District and Yasumasa Shigeno in the Oita Prefecture 2nd District. Of the two, Teruya’s seat is more likely to remain with the DPJ if it leaves the coalition. Shigeno’s situation is harder to read, but it’s not clear that the SDP will be better off here if it remains in the coalition.
Teruya was first elected as an anti-military independent to national office in 1995 to the upper house for the single seat that was up for election that year in two-seat Okinawa. He yielded his position as the anti-military candidate in the 2004 upper house election to Keiko Itokazu (who easily defeated the LDP candidate), but returned to the Diet as the lower house member from the Okinawa Prefecture 2nd District as a member of the SDP. He was reelected in 2005—when the DPJ candidate finished a near-fringe candidate third behind the LDP also-ran—and 2009. Through all this, he has also enjoyed the support of the Okinawa Social Mass Party, which has drifted to the left over the years as it lost a good portion of its support base to the LDP and DPJ. My guess is that he will be more helped than harmed by a DPJ challenger, who would only wind up as a spoilsport for the LDP candidate by splitting the pro-military vote. On the other hand, if the DPJ remains in the coalition, Teruya may bolt the SDP and run as an independent in the next lower house election, which would be the surest way for the DPJ to lose that seat.
Shigeno’s situation is different. A dyed-in-the-wool SDP member who worked his way up the prefectural civil service labor union ladder, then turned to politics fulltime, serving as a prefectural assemblyman for 26 years, and winning a national office in the 2000 lower house election as a regional proportional candidate. (He ran simultaneously in the Oita Prefecture 2nd District, where he lost to Seishiro Eto, the LDP incumbent.) His subsequent track record: (2003) FPP loss, regional loss; (2005) FPP loss, regional win; (2009) FPP win—finally beating Eto in a close race. Shigeno had been gaining votes in each election even before the historical alliance in the 2009 election, so it’s not a given that he will lose his FPP seat—possibly against a rookie if Eto, 72 by the time a 2013 election rolls around—if he DPJ withdraws its support, in which case, he will still have an excellent chance of making it back on the SDP’s regional proportional ticket. On the other hand, he is not a shoo-in even if the SDP stays in the coalition, given that Eto managed to run a close second in an election that turned out to be a disaster for the LDP overall.
To sum it up, if the SDP remains in the coalition, it may lose the Okinawa FPP seat through defection while the Oita FPP seat is not a sure thing even with DPJ support. If the SDP leaves the coalition, it is highly likely to retain the Okinawa FPP seat while there is a good chance that it will lose the Oita FPP seat.
The SDP is not, or course, a single-issue party, and many things can happen between now and whenever. But the impact of a withdrawal from the coalition on the SDP’s FPP seats is ambiguous at worst. Given the predictable, immediate fallout on the upper house proportional ballot and its reputation as a party of principle/protest as well as the institutional memory of the disaster that the 1994-1995 cohabitation under Tomiichi Murayama turned out to be, I have to put my money on a formal split.
And I’ll know soon enough if I’m wrong.
Addendum (blooper alert): Anonymous reminds me in the comments that Kiyomi Tsujimoto made it through in the Osaka 10th District. Thanks. That also provides a good motive for Tsujimoto’s reluctance to speak out against Hatoyama after Fukushima resigned. The SDP will most likely have to kiss her seat goodbye if the DPJ decides to field its own candidate there, meaning that she would have to take up the 1 seat that the DPJ will win in the 29-seat Kinki region proportional district. Add this long-term outlook to the threat of a second DPJ upper house candidate in the Niigata Prefectural District and a collaborative relationship on an issue-by-issue basis becomes attractive from a purely electoral point of view. After all, the SDP should be able to maintain its 2 upper house proportional seats even if its share of the national vote falls to 3%. Whether the SDP activists will accept this line of reasoning—if indeed the SDP leadership iss thinking along these lines—is another matter altogether. And that’s about as far as my arithmetic takes me.
* In fact, some DPJ political operatives are reportedly threatening to field a second candidate for the two Niigata Prefecture upper house seats coming up for the 2007 election. The SDP and the DPJ currently hold one seat each. Ichiro Ozawa is pushing a second candidate in all the other two-seaters but has refrained from doing so as a favor to the SDP.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Kicked Out of Cabinet, Protest Party Ponders Next Move
Sorry I haven’t been following up on my promises, and comments. Here’s a piece, a little too wonkish to make its way to Eurasia Group clients, but hopefully informative for people who want some background on what’s going down in the Japanese political scene. Unedited, but I have to cook some pasta; it’s 20:31 in Tokyo.
Now that Prime Minister Hatoyama has dismissed Social Democratic Party leader Mizuho Fukushima from her cabinet post for making it clear that she would refuse to add her signature to the cabinet decision—by custom, all cabinet decisions and other official cabinet acts must be unanimous—speculation turns to whether or not the SDP will remain in the coalition, a course of action Prime Minister Hatoyama and DPJ don Ichiro Ozawa are more than willing to oblige.
The quid pro quo in the alliance between the DPJ and SPD is fairly straightforward. The SDP gives its support to DPJ candidates in return for input on policy*. It’s easy to forget that the SDP stands for anything more than post-war pacifism, but it continues to push policies to help the socio-economic underdogs and otherwise support antiestablishment causes. Its landmark achievement in this Diet session is a legislative bill that severely limits the labor dispatching business. Seeing dispatched workers and other non-permanent forms of employment as the major cause of falling wages, it teamed up with the PNP, the other minority coalition partner, to overturn a compromise between the government, business, and big labor and force the Hatoyama administration to further tighten the screw. But inevitably, there have been far more disappointments than accomplishments. The SDP has had to set aside its anti-nuclear power stance in favor of the DPJ’s climate change agenda, all but give up on enfranchising permanent residents in local government elections, and accept the dispatch of Maritime Self-Defense Force escort ships for anti-piracy patrol near Somalia**, to name a few prominent examples of its typical left-wing protest agenda.
The setbacks can take its toll at the voting stations. Its leaders remember well that it was decimated (in the original sense) when it gained the prime minister’s chair in 1994 in exchange for abandoning its opposition to the Japan-US alliance and accepting the constitutionality of the Self-Defense Forces. Since then, it has steadily declined in the polls as protest voters shifted to the Japan Communist Party*** and floater voters found other, new non-LDP alternatives to turn to. The reversion, more or less, to the original 2006/2009 plan for moving US Marines helicopters from Futenma to the vicinities of Camp Schwab came to strike at the heart of the SDP’s reason d’être as the anti-alliance, pro-underdog party because of Hatoyama’s near-criminal negligence around the issue. Acquiescing would have meant running the risk of further alienating its core left-wing supporters.
It is clear that Ichiro Ozawa, by far the single most powerful man in the DPJ now, want to keep the camel in the tent. His priorities seem to be: 1) stay in power in the DPJ, 2) minimize losses in the July upper house election, and 3) destroy the LDP. Priority 1) means that he must give up the floater vote and concentrate on roping in special interests/captive voters****. That explains his courting of the Japan Post cadres in defiance of MSM. And the 4% more or less of actual voters that the SDP may be able to convince to vote for DPJ candidates—I’m guessing less if the SDP stays in the coalition—will be more than enough to tip close elections.
The big question for the SDP is: Should it consider continued input on policy questions—there is no one in Japanese politics whose reward and punishment are as sure and swift as Ozawa—is worth risking its long-term viability as a focal point for the protest vote? After all, you can’t root for the underdog if you are dead.
We’ll know the answer on Sunday, when the SDP leadership convenes to decide what to do next.
Now that Prime Minister Hatoyama has dismissed Social Democratic Party leader Mizuho Fukushima from her cabinet post for making it clear that she would refuse to add her signature to the cabinet decision—by custom, all cabinet decisions and other official cabinet acts must be unanimous—speculation turns to whether or not the SDP will remain in the coalition, a course of action Prime Minister Hatoyama and DPJ don Ichiro Ozawa are more than willing to oblige.
The quid pro quo in the alliance between the DPJ and SPD is fairly straightforward. The SDP gives its support to DPJ candidates in return for input on policy*. It’s easy to forget that the SDP stands for anything more than post-war pacifism, but it continues to push policies to help the socio-economic underdogs and otherwise support antiestablishment causes. Its landmark achievement in this Diet session is a legislative bill that severely limits the labor dispatching business. Seeing dispatched workers and other non-permanent forms of employment as the major cause of falling wages, it teamed up with the PNP, the other minority coalition partner, to overturn a compromise between the government, business, and big labor and force the Hatoyama administration to further tighten the screw. But inevitably, there have been far more disappointments than accomplishments. The SDP has had to set aside its anti-nuclear power stance in favor of the DPJ’s climate change agenda, all but give up on enfranchising permanent residents in local government elections, and accept the dispatch of Maritime Self-Defense Force escort ships for anti-piracy patrol near Somalia**, to name a few prominent examples of its typical left-wing protest agenda.
The setbacks can take its toll at the voting stations. Its leaders remember well that it was decimated (in the original sense) when it gained the prime minister’s chair in 1994 in exchange for abandoning its opposition to the Japan-US alliance and accepting the constitutionality of the Self-Defense Forces. Since then, it has steadily declined in the polls as protest voters shifted to the Japan Communist Party*** and floater voters found other, new non-LDP alternatives to turn to. The reversion, more or less, to the original 2006/2009 plan for moving US Marines helicopters from Futenma to the vicinities of Camp Schwab came to strike at the heart of the SDP’s reason d’être as the anti-alliance, pro-underdog party because of Hatoyama’s near-criminal negligence around the issue. Acquiescing would have meant running the risk of further alienating its core left-wing supporters.
It is clear that Ichiro Ozawa, by far the single most powerful man in the DPJ now, want to keep the camel in the tent. His priorities seem to be: 1) stay in power in the DPJ, 2) minimize losses in the July upper house election, and 3) destroy the LDP. Priority 1) means that he must give up the floater vote and concentrate on roping in special interests/captive voters****. That explains his courting of the Japan Post cadres in defiance of MSM. And the 4% more or less of actual voters that the SDP may be able to convince to vote for DPJ candidates—I’m guessing less if the SDP stays in the coalition—will be more than enough to tip close elections.
The big question for the SDP is: Should it consider continued input on policy questions—there is no one in Japanese politics whose reward and punishment are as sure and swift as Ozawa—is worth risking its long-term viability as a focal point for the protest vote? After all, you can’t root for the underdog if you are dead.
We’ll know the answer on Sunday, when the SDP leadership convenes to decide what to do next.
* It’s actually a little more complicated than that. The DPJ supported a few SDP candidates in single seat districts in the 2009 lower house election and has agreed in the July upper house election to refrain from putting up a second candidate in the two-seat upper-house Niigata-Prefecture district. The latter is little more than symbolic, since the SDP has little hope of outpolling the LDP candidate for the “other” seat.
** Kiyomi Tsuji, a member of the SDP leadership and sub-cabinet appointee, is the founder and major supporter of the Peace Boat initiative, which according to its website is “a Japan-based international non-governmental and non-profit organization that works to promote peace, human rights, equal and sustainable development and respect for the environment.” In May 2009, the Peace Boat sought and received protection from the JMSDF escort ship on duty when it passed through the Gulf of Aden. The irony was not lost on the Japanese public and media.
*** Take a look at the post-Murayama cabinet upper house elections. TheDPJSDP (thank you, Michael) has steadily lost ground, with 7.79% of the national proportional seat vote in 1998, 6.63% in 2001, 5.35% in 2004, and 4.47% in 2007. The JCP has done somewhat better, surging to 14.60% in 1998, though slipping to 7.91% in 2001, 7.80% in 2004, and 7.48% in 2007.
**** Special interests include labor; a typical group of captive voters is the Sokagakkai.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
DPJ Squeeze on Coalition Partners Begins
I’ve been working on the beginnings of a series of posts on Japanese politics. In the meantime, a quickie:
Asahi Shimbun reports that the DPJ is including in its Upper House election platform a pledge to reduce the 242 member Upper House by 40 seats. This can be done by the following means, or a combination thereof:
1) Reduce proportional seats, currently at 96.
2) Consolidate prefectural districts, eliminating for most practical purposes the 2-seat floor—one per triennial election, in which half of the seats come up for election—for the smallest prefectures, which are grossly overrepresented as currently configured.
3) Exacerbate the overrepresentation of the 2-seat prefectures.
1) is sure to be a large part of the answer—at the expense of the mini-and micro-parties, who pin their hopes on the proportional voting. Thus the SDP and PNP cannot like this one bit. The SDP should be particularly troubled, since Prime Minister Hatoyama is drifting inexorably towards a intra-coalition showdown on the Futenma question with a proposal that includes relocation within Okinawa. This is anathema to the SDP, whose leadership is fundamentally at odds with the Japan-US alliance. But the LDP is likely to fall in line with some version of this option, which means that a legislative bill on this point will have an excellent chance of passing in the current Diet session. The DPJ may have already begun reshaping the coalition, something that I had not expected to happen before the July election.
Asahi Shimbun reports that the DPJ is including in its Upper House election platform a pledge to reduce the 242 member Upper House by 40 seats. This can be done by the following means, or a combination thereof:
1) Reduce proportional seats, currently at 96.
2) Consolidate prefectural districts, eliminating for most practical purposes the 2-seat floor—one per triennial election, in which half of the seats come up for election—for the smallest prefectures, which are grossly overrepresented as currently configured.
3) Exacerbate the overrepresentation of the 2-seat prefectures.
1) is sure to be a large part of the answer—at the expense of the mini-and micro-parties, who pin their hopes on the proportional voting. Thus the SDP and PNP cannot like this one bit. The SDP should be particularly troubled, since Prime Minister Hatoyama is drifting inexorably towards a intra-coalition showdown on the Futenma question with a proposal that includes relocation within Okinawa. This is anathema to the SDP, whose leadership is fundamentally at odds with the Japan-US alliance. But the LDP is likely to fall in line with some version of this option, which means that a legislative bill on this point will have an excellent chance of passing in the current Diet session. The DPJ may have already begun reshaping the coalition, something that I had not expected to happen before the July election.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Profiling the (Mostly) LDP Renegades
This has been sitting on my hard disk for ten days. I’m not sure that I can do much more with it, so I’m putting it out here without further editing before it rots on the vine. (The Note will be forthcoming, RS.) That’s it for now.
The 2 May virtual deadline for starting new political parties before the July Upper House election in Japan having passed without further incident—the names of parties established after that date are not protected from copycats, which can cause serious problems in the proportional seats vote—it’s a good time to take a look at the upside of the flurry of LDP split-offs for the July Upper House election and beyond. None of them should emerge from the vote with more than a handful of Upper House seats. However, the DPJ is increasingly likely to fall short of a simple Upper House majority and the motley three-party coalition faces a growing chance of losing its collective majority. Thus, the new parties deserve a look as actors in a post-election shakeup. True, Komeito, the political arm of the lay Buddhist organization Sokagakkai, remains the best bet as a post-election coalition partner: it will be able to ensure an Upper House majority by itself for a DPJ-led coalition and is policy-wise more compatible with the latter than its troublesome populist bedmates. However, it has limited upside due to its near-total reliance on its religious base. Thus, the upstarts bear watching with an eye to the future beyond the immediate post-election coalition makeup. With that, here’s a roll call.
Your Party (YP): Heads the list in the latest Nikkei-TV Tokyo poll (23-25 April) with 11% in voter intent—after DPJ and LDP at 20% and 4% respectively. Headed by Yoshimi Watanabe, the YP consists of four Lower House members, two LDP and one DPJ defectors and an independent, and one Upper House member, an independent AIDS activist. The YP has by far the biggest upside. First, they share a small-government, free-market orientation that established parties have moved away from in the post-Koizumi years. This makes the YP an unlikely coalition partner with the DPJ under the politics-first Ozawa, but gives it a policy coherence lacking in the other new alternatives. This should serve it well in a broader, if more distant, realignment. Second, it has yout on its side—an appealing quality for an electorate deeply dissatisfied with the status quo. All five Diet members are youthful and articulate post-baby boomers. Third, it will have the largest number of seats among the newcomers—its voter intent share translates into a minimum of five to six proportional Upper House seats in addition to its four incumbents. Finally, it is the only splinter group that has LDP, DPJ and truly independent Diet members.
New Party Reform: Taken over by and renamed for articulate, brainy public favorite and reformist Yoichi Masuzoe, it only took a 2% share in the aforementioned poll, but surged to 7% on the voter intent question. That difference can only be attributed to Masuzoe—he's essentially Moses Malone with four guys from Petersburg, Virginia. If the NPR can hold on to something like that until July, it'll add one or two proportional Upper House seats to the two that are up for reelection in addition to Masuzoe’s, which comes up for reelection in 2013. Still, that’ll only give it five to six, a far cry from the 10-15 seats that the YP is targeting, even if it also retains its one regional seat that is up for reelection. Masuzoe’s star was tarnished when the reform-minded maverick threw in his lot with a group of old-school politicians facing retirement or uphill battles in the July election. Lacking policy coherence and with its leader commanding little to no personal loyalty from his ex-peers in the LDP, the YP’s upside is limited in any post-election maneuvering and the more distant, if roader realignment.
The Sunrise Party of Japan: Middle-of-the-road reformist and fiscal conservative Kaoru Yosano cast his lot with nationalist counter-reform-minded Takeo Hiranuma—to whom he was promptly forced to take a back seat—and friends. The media image of a marriage of convenience among over-the-hill politicians—the average age of its Diet members is seventy—severely limits the SUP’s upside. With three Lower House members and two Lower House members, it will be lucky to break even by holding on to the Upper House seat up for reelection and picking up a proportional seat if the Nikkei-TV Tokyo poll is to be believed,.
Kunio Hatoyama: The sixty-one year old younger brother of the prime minister is the odd man out. He never fulfilled his early promise as the Golden Boy of the LDP; now his peregrinations have left him with no one—not even the members of the LDP rank-and-file to whom he reportedly gave financial assistance early in their political careers—by his side as he impetuously bolted once again in his belief that he would be the precipitator of a new realignment of the Japanese political order.
The 2 May virtual deadline for starting new political parties before the July Upper House election in Japan having passed without further incident—the names of parties established after that date are not protected from copycats, which can cause serious problems in the proportional seats vote—it’s a good time to take a look at the upside of the flurry of LDP split-offs for the July Upper House election and beyond. None of them should emerge from the vote with more than a handful of Upper House seats. However, the DPJ is increasingly likely to fall short of a simple Upper House majority and the motley three-party coalition faces a growing chance of losing its collective majority. Thus, the new parties deserve a look as actors in a post-election shakeup. True, Komeito, the political arm of the lay Buddhist organization Sokagakkai, remains the best bet as a post-election coalition partner: it will be able to ensure an Upper House majority by itself for a DPJ-led coalition and is policy-wise more compatible with the latter than its troublesome populist bedmates. However, it has limited upside due to its near-total reliance on its religious base. Thus, the upstarts bear watching with an eye to the future beyond the immediate post-election coalition makeup. With that, here’s a roll call.
Your Party (YP): Heads the list in the latest Nikkei-TV Tokyo poll (23-25 April) with 11% in voter intent—after DPJ and LDP at 20% and 4% respectively. Headed by Yoshimi Watanabe, the YP consists of four Lower House members, two LDP and one DPJ defectors and an independent, and one Upper House member, an independent AIDS activist. The YP has by far the biggest upside. First, they share a small-government, free-market orientation that established parties have moved away from in the post-Koizumi years. This makes the YP an unlikely coalition partner with the DPJ under the politics-first Ozawa, but gives it a policy coherence lacking in the other new alternatives. This should serve it well in a broader, if more distant, realignment. Second, it has yout on its side—an appealing quality for an electorate deeply dissatisfied with the status quo. All five Diet members are youthful and articulate post-baby boomers. Third, it will have the largest number of seats among the newcomers—its voter intent share translates into a minimum of five to six proportional Upper House seats in addition to its four incumbents. Finally, it is the only splinter group that has LDP, DPJ and truly independent Diet members.
New Party Reform: Taken over by and renamed for articulate, brainy public favorite and reformist Yoichi Masuzoe, it only took a 2% share in the aforementioned poll, but surged to 7% on the voter intent question. That difference can only be attributed to Masuzoe—he's essentially Moses Malone with four guys from Petersburg, Virginia. If the NPR can hold on to something like that until July, it'll add one or two proportional Upper House seats to the two that are up for reelection in addition to Masuzoe’s, which comes up for reelection in 2013. Still, that’ll only give it five to six, a far cry from the 10-15 seats that the YP is targeting, even if it also retains its one regional seat that is up for reelection. Masuzoe’s star was tarnished when the reform-minded maverick threw in his lot with a group of old-school politicians facing retirement or uphill battles in the July election. Lacking policy coherence and with its leader commanding little to no personal loyalty from his ex-peers in the LDP, the YP’s upside is limited in any post-election maneuvering and the more distant, if roader realignment.
The Sunrise Party of Japan: Middle-of-the-road reformist and fiscal conservative Kaoru Yosano cast his lot with nationalist counter-reform-minded Takeo Hiranuma—to whom he was promptly forced to take a back seat—and friends. The media image of a marriage of convenience among over-the-hill politicians—the average age of its Diet members is seventy—severely limits the SUP’s upside. With three Lower House members and two Lower House members, it will be lucky to break even by holding on to the Upper House seat up for reelection and picking up a proportional seat if the Nikkei-TV Tokyo poll is to be believed,.
Kunio Hatoyama: The sixty-one year old younger brother of the prime minister is the odd man out. He never fulfilled his early promise as the Golden Boy of the LDP; now his peregrinations have left him with no one—not even the members of the LDP rank-and-file to whom he reportedly gave financial assistance early in their political careers—by his side as he impetuously bolted once again in his belief that he would be the precipitator of a new realignment of the Japanese political order.
Wednesday, May 05, 2010
Pre-election, Hatozawa Resignation?
Hey, yours truly, quoted in The Telegraph. I actually suggested it as a “very easy-to-carry-out scenario.” I know, I know, first someone has to bell the Tenacious Twosome…
Monday, April 26, 2010
The Death of the LDP? Maybe. But Don’t Hold Your Breath.
There’s plenty of media speculation about the future of the LDP, and none of it is positive. With good reason too, what with some of its most media-friendly Diet members flaking off against the backdrop of a lackluster leadership utterly unable to cash in on the difficulties that the coalition government and the DPJ have been running into. I’ve been engaging in idle speculation about the eventual fall of the LDP myself but I don’t have anything useful in that direction to offer—I say idle and nothing useful because I cannot yet put the event on any kind of a timeline with any degree of confidence; mountains will crumble or disappear into the sea, heck, the whole universe is going to stop one day, a broken clock...—so why not indulge myself in a little counterintuitive thinking and try to amuse you by making a case for the LDP saving match point for now?
What touched off the latest flurry of glee/alarm/speculation was the defection of Yoichi Masuzoe, the public’s hands-down favorite over Seiji Maehara, Katsuya Okada, Nobuteru Ishihara, etc., etc. as the politician of choice to join five other Upper House members in in a de facto takeover of the Kaikaku Kurabu (Japan Renaissance Party) and renaming it the Shinto Kaikaku (New Party Renaissance?) as a platform for his political ambitions. The Masuzoe effect is considerable, as the Nikkei-TV Tokyo 23-25 national poll gave SK/KK a remarkable 7% in voter intent in the July Upper House election (DPJ 20%, LDP 14%, Your Party 11%, SK/KK 7%, Komeito 4%, JCP 3%, Stand Up Japan 2%, SDP 1%, PNP 0%, New Party Nippon 0%, others (the Happy Science folks?) 2%, undecided 23%, don’t know/won’t tell 12%). If this is reflected in the actual voting for the proportional seats, the SK/KK will take five out of the 48 proportional seats at stake. With Masuzoe’s seat, it will have six seats, enough to cross the five-member threshold for parliamentary privileges as a legitimate political party. Who knows, it could very well pick up another seat or two in the larger Kanto or Kansai multimember districts.
Now at this point, those of you who have been paying attention to the numbers will be wondering, Masuzoe goes into the election with six seats, emerges with six—seven, eight max and that’s supposed to be a big deal? Yes, it is, and that’s why Masuzoe is not such a big deal after all. And the reason for this can be compressed into the briefest of bios for Masuzoe’s five compadres:
This begs the question: Why did Masuzoe enter into this marriage of pure convenience, and to boot a nuptial with the bride in the Russia joke—but I digress—in the first place? To ask the question is to answer it: because nobody did. Masuzoe by all accounts is the smartest Diet member in all of DPJ but has no personal following whatsoever. The lack of close-up personal charm, the inability to manage up or down, is a charge that apparently has dogged him since his earliest years as a brilliant assistant professor of political science at Tokyo University. So if you’re a middle-of-the-road reform-minded political wannabie and you’ve been rejected by the LDP/DPJ as a candidate in the upcoming Upper House election, who are you going to hitch your wagon to, the SK/KK aka New Party Masuzoe (reportedly the first choice for the new party’s nomenclature), or the more youthful Your Party, with an identity beyond a single, media-friendly individual?
According to the poll, Masuzoe’s defection is paralleled by the LDP’s 2 percentage-point drop (22%-20%) in voter intent. It’s more or less what you’d expect from the rock-bottom LDP, and far lower than the SK/SS surge from virtually nil to 7%. At the same time, the DPJ fell from 33% to 27%. That raises the suspicion that Masuzoe’s defection from the LDP ate into the DPJ’s support from the independent floater voters, and also limited the Your Party’s upside there. As for Kaoru Yosano’s (Takeo Hiranuma’s, actually)—Stand Up Guys, it’s barely treading water.
If there’s a common thread tying Masuzoe, (Yoshimi) Watanabe, Yosano, and (Kunio) Hatoyama (already ripe for one of those vehicles for former B-list celebrities) together other than the relatively favorable media coverage that they have attracted—Hatoyama’s is more mixed than that of the others—it’s the fact that they are political loners. None of them built up a personal following while he were with the LDP. What makes them think that they can do so now? Of these, Watanabe is better positioned, as he is only of the Your Party band of media-friendly, relatively youthful brothers, ex-LDP, ex-DPJ, and independent, the team with the biggest upside.
It could do badly in the Upper House election and would still be the second largest party there by a wide margin. And it will also have 119 seats in the Lower House—knock on wood if you’re an LDP supporter—for another three years. And the LDP still has a few attractive faces to turn to. It would be foolish to count them out before they are down and really out.
Now at this point, ideally, I’d like to turn to the Maehara-Ozawa war and how that could bring an end to the DPJ as we know it, or the Ozayama regime at least. But I’m out of time.
Promise to respond to pending comments. But not now. Sorry.
What touched off the latest flurry of glee/alarm/speculation was the defection of Yoichi Masuzoe, the public’s hands-down favorite over Seiji Maehara, Katsuya Okada, Nobuteru Ishihara, etc., etc. as the politician of choice to join five other Upper House members in in a de facto takeover of the Kaikaku Kurabu (Japan Renaissance Party) and renaming it the Shinto Kaikaku (New Party Renaissance?) as a platform for his political ambitions. The Masuzoe effect is considerable, as the Nikkei-TV Tokyo 23-25 national poll gave SK/KK a remarkable 7% in voter intent in the July Upper House election (DPJ 20%, LDP 14%, Your Party 11%, SK/KK 7%, Komeito 4%, JCP 3%, Stand Up Japan 2%, SDP 1%, PNP 0%, New Party Nippon 0%, others (the Happy Science folks?) 2%, undecided 23%, don’t know/won’t tell 12%). If this is reflected in the actual voting for the proportional seats, the SK/KK will take five out of the 48 proportional seats at stake. With Masuzoe’s seat, it will have six seats, enough to cross the five-member threshold for parliamentary privileges as a legitimate political party. Who knows, it could very well pick up another seat or two in the larger Kanto or Kansai multimember districts.
Now at this point, those of you who have been paying attention to the numbers will be wondering, Masuzoe goes into the election with six seats, emerges with six—seven, eight max and that’s supposed to be a big deal? Yes, it is, and that’s why Masuzoe is not such a big deal after all. And the reason for this can be compressed into the briefest of bios for Masuzoe’s five compadres:
Hideo Watanabe (75): head of the old Kaikaku Kurabu, elected to the UH in 2004 on the DPJ proportional ticket.In other words, Masuzoe is teaming up with a group of people whose terms expire in July and a) were not good enough to win locally the last time around but slipped through by way of the national showing of their respective parties, b) are retiring, or c) both. It is not surprising then, that none of his now-friends show sign of affinity to the reformist strain of Japanese politics that Masuzoe is identified with and derives public support from. In fact, the ringleader of the has-beens, Hideo Watanabe, is just as old school as Ichiro Ozawa and Shizuka Kamei, if not more so.
Hiroyuki Arai (51) elected to the UH in 2004 on the LDP proportional ticket.
Tetsuro Yano (63) elected to the UH in 2004 on the LDP proportional ticket, announced intent to retire (2009 December).
Masakatsu Koike (58) elected to the UH in 2004 on the LDP proportional ticket, failed to get LDP nomination to run in his home district in the upcoming election.
Toshio Yamauchi (63) elected to the UH in 2004 on the LDP Kagawa Prefecture ticket, announced intent to retire (2009 September).
For the record, Masuzoe is 61, and holds an Upper House seat and will be up for Upper House reelection (Lower House election?) in 2013.
This begs the question: Why did Masuzoe enter into this marriage of pure convenience, and to boot a nuptial with the bride in the Russia joke—but I digress—in the first place? To ask the question is to answer it: because nobody did. Masuzoe by all accounts is the smartest Diet member in all of DPJ but has no personal following whatsoever. The lack of close-up personal charm, the inability to manage up or down, is a charge that apparently has dogged him since his earliest years as a brilliant assistant professor of political science at Tokyo University. So if you’re a middle-of-the-road reform-minded political wannabie and you’ve been rejected by the LDP/DPJ as a candidate in the upcoming Upper House election, who are you going to hitch your wagon to, the SK/KK aka New Party Masuzoe (reportedly the first choice for the new party’s nomenclature), or the more youthful Your Party, with an identity beyond a single, media-friendly individual?
According to the poll, Masuzoe’s defection is paralleled by the LDP’s 2 percentage-point drop (22%-20%) in voter intent. It’s more or less what you’d expect from the rock-bottom LDP, and far lower than the SK/SS surge from virtually nil to 7%. At the same time, the DPJ fell from 33% to 27%. That raises the suspicion that Masuzoe’s defection from the LDP ate into the DPJ’s support from the independent floater voters, and also limited the Your Party’s upside there. As for Kaoru Yosano’s (Takeo Hiranuma’s, actually)—Stand Up Guys, it’s barely treading water.
If there’s a common thread tying Masuzoe, (Yoshimi) Watanabe, Yosano, and (Kunio) Hatoyama (already ripe for one of those vehicles for former B-list celebrities) together other than the relatively favorable media coverage that they have attracted—Hatoyama’s is more mixed than that of the others—it’s the fact that they are political loners. None of them built up a personal following while he were with the LDP. What makes them think that they can do so now? Of these, Watanabe is better positioned, as he is only of the Your Party band of media-friendly, relatively youthful brothers, ex-LDP, ex-DPJ, and independent, the team with the biggest upside.
It could do badly in the Upper House election and would still be the second largest party there by a wide margin. And it will also have 119 seats in the Lower House—knock on wood if you’re an LDP supporter—for another three years. And the LDP still has a few attractive faces to turn to. It would be foolish to count them out before they are down and really out.
Now at this point, ideally, I’d like to turn to the Maehara-Ozawa war and how that could bring an end to the DPJ as we know it, or the Ozayama regime at least. But I’m out of time.
Promise to respond to pending comments. But not now. Sorry.
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