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.

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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.

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.

Why Losing the July Election Can Be a Blessing in Disguise to the DPJ

I’ve been saying that the DPJ must dump the SDP in order to bring more coherence to policymaking. But the latest uproar over the joint official announcement on Japan Post by cabinet ministers “Anything But” Shizuka Kamei and Haraguchi to raise the JP deposit limit from 10 million yen to 20 million yen and insurance limit from 13 million to 25 million among other things—I’ll come back to this later if time and professional obligations allow—is yet another piece of proof that the PNP (actually Kamei’s one-man show since Tamisuke Watanuki and Hisaoki Kamei lost their seats in the 2009 Lower House election) is a more expensive drag on the DPJ policy agenda.

Kamei is one of the shrewdest political operators around. He makes outlandish demands, but will settle for what he can get. He has been supremely successful in this game—except for a once-in-lifetime miscalculation in 2005, when Prime Minister Koizumi made good on his threat to toss the LDP Lower House members who voted against his JP privatization bill. Fast-forward to 2010, when the first two rounds of contradictory statements among coalition notables have taken up the better part of the last two days: Kamei’s announcement, the complaints from the other cabinet ministers, Hatoyama’s attempt to play both sides of the debate, Kamei’s counterclaim I had the prime minister’s consent!, Hatoyama and his chief cabinet secretary’s counter-counterstatements---but you get the picture.

However, if the DPJ loses enough seats in the July Upper House election to prevent the current three-party coalition to command a there, the SDP and PNP can become useless, since Komeito—at a minimum likely to break even—will be able to give the DPJ a majority all by its lonesome self. And as I’ve been saying for some time now, Komeito is the natural coalition partner for the DPJ. Now, Komeito may decide to stay out of the cabinet and cooperate on a case by case basis. But how can that be as bad as cohabitation with incompatible bedmates?

Why the Flip-Flopping on Income Ceiling for Child Allowance?

According to media reports, bowing to fiscal reality, the DPJ is now considering an income ceiling for the child allowance that it had promised in its election manifesto—and had already decided to cut by half for FY2010 for budgetary and other concerns. But the DPJ is not the only one doing a flip-flop. According to Yomiuri and Mainichi, the three-party talks this morning (Dec. 16) to hammer out an agreement on major budget items could not come to a conclusion on this point because the DSP was reluctant to agree to a ceiling. This interesting because the DSP had openly favored an income test at the beginning of the Hatoyama administration two months ago.

Now this may turn out to be an internal schism; SDP leader and Minister of State for Consumer Affairs and Food Safety, Social Affairs, and Gender Equality Mizuho Fukushima and SDP policy head Tomoko Abe, who represented the SDP at the meeting, reportedly do not get along with each other. But it’s also possible that the DSP is doing this just to embarrass the Hatoyama administration. The best DSP bet for surviving the 2010 House of Councilors election, i.e. deny the DPJ or a DPJ-PNP coalition an absolute majority, is to pry away as many floater voters away as possible from the DPJ and hope that they’ll at least abstain if not vote for the DSP. To that end, it should want to go into the election under a weak, unpopular Hatoyama administration, much in the way that the LDP did under the Abe and Aso administrations. Note that the perception that Hatoyama can be bullied makes defiance easier.

The DPJ and PNP will continue to test the limits of the coalition by doing their best to show up the Prime Minister and the DPJ. This is a part of the political dynamics that bears watching.

Shakedown, or… Shakedown? The First Days of the Coalition

The following is my response to Mark’s comment here. Personal circumstances have forced me to neglect my self-assumed obligation to people who comment on my blog. I’ll cover them all in due course, but now that I have a little more time (for today at least), I’ve decided to adopt the LIFO principle for my backlog. (Sorry, Matt, etc.)

And I promise to get back to those writing proposals of mine as soon as I can. Sorry, GD, NF.

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Mark: Sadly for those of us who need a major Japanese politic theater fix, given the huge DPJ victory in the 2007 HOC election, nothing short of a miracle will give the LDP-Komeito coalition an HOC majority in the 2010 election. That being said, the main bumps on the road so far:

Minister of State for Postal Reform Shizuka Kamei’s turf fight with MIAC Minister Kazuhiro Haraguti, as Haraguti dares to opine on the future of Japan Post, an institution over which he, as MIAC Minister has formal jurisdiction and knows inside out.

Minister of State for Financial Services Kamei’s turf fight with MOF Minister Hirohisa, as Fujii expressesd reservations over Kamei’s 3-year moratorium for bank loans to small and medium enterprises. The MOF Minister has partial or total jurisdiction over all financial Japangos, and will have to cough up the fiscal resources necessary to compensate the banks in the event the Hatoyama administration decides to implement the PNP proposal.

PNP leader and representative for the Intra-Cabinet Party-Leader Trilateral Shizuka Kamei’s verbal jousting with MOF Minister Hirohisa over the DPJ’s promise for an across-the-board child allowance. Kamei wants to set an income ceiling, so as not to benefit the wealthy…

…do I see a pattern emerging?

BTW, in the last endeavor, Kamei is joined by:

SDP leader and representative for the Intra-Cabinet Party-Leader Trilateral—as well as Minister of State for Social Affairs—Mizuho Fukushima.

Speaking of the Intra-Cabinet Party-Leader Trilateral, the third party will not always be the Prime Minister. In fact, the DPJ participant is more often than not likely to be Naoto Kan, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of State for National Strategy, who happens to be p!ssed off (if media reports are to be believed) because his DPJ policy base has been kicked out from under his other foot as Ichiro Ozawa (and Hatoyama) abruptly decided to abolish the DPJ Policy Research Council—not a bad decision per se, considering the new setup replacing it that will potentially tighten the hold of the Cabinet over the policymaking process. (Here, I disagree with some of the MSM thinking on this measure.) The idea (again according to media reports) was to have Kan assume the PRC Chair, which would have made him the Policy Czar, the double-headed eagle as far as substance was concerned.

MLIT Minister Seiji Maehara’s public works woes assumed as the consequence of including the cancellation of the Yanba Dam construction, in Maehara’s words “because it’s in our manifest” (in my view carelessly inserted), as well as JAL’s business woes precipitously dumped in his lap. I didn’t see these two coming, and neither of these lend themselves to easy solution. Yanba Dam reminds me of Tokyo Governor Yukio Aoshima’s fulfillment of his campaign promise to shut down the Tokyo Expo—a very unpleasant precedent for the past and future DPJ would-be-king.

There may be more, but I think that’s enough. I have no idea if these are portents of things to come—in which case the whole of the Hatoyama Cabinet will be much smaller than its parts—or merely a shakedown process of an untested policy vehicle that will soon hit its stride.

Stay tuned, folks.