Japan's Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has proved himself one of the more charismatic leaders of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that has largely dominated country’s politics for the last sixty years. On the face of it, his decision yesterday to call a snap election after his plans to privatize the Japanese Post Office were defeated in the Upper House of Parliament, just over a month after they scraped through the Lower House, appears quixotic. However Koizumi has proved himself an astute political infighter.
It was thought the Japanese leader would stick to his announced intention to stand down next year and probably quit politics. If he plans to stick to that timetable, then the election he has called for next month could prove dangerous for the LDP who would effectively be entering it with a lame duck leader.
There is no certainty that the party will beat off what is expected to be a strong challenge from the opposition Democratic Party (DPJ), which did well in the last elections to both houses of the Parliament.
Koizumi may however have calculated that his reforms, on which he made the breakup of the post office effectively a confidence issue, have a way to go yet and he has changed his mind about quitting before seeing more of them through. If he is returned to power, he will have vanquished his many opponents in the LDP while receiving a mandate, however small, to push on with change.
If however, he is defeated and the LDP is robbed of power, he will then have had the satisfaction of seeing his political enemies within the party swinging on a hook of their own making, while he can resume his original plan to quit front-line politics. It is certainly expected that most of the LDP legislators who rebelled against him will be dropped from the party’s candidate lists for the Sept. 11 ballot. So win or lose Koizumi will have his revenge for their disloyalty.
Were the still personally popular prime minister to be returned to power, then he really will have the chance to make a lasting mark on the country’s economy with radical measures which many old guard LDP members and faction heads have long resisted. Not the least of these would be playing midwife to the birth from the post office of the world’s biggest bank with assets in excess of $3 trillion.
However, for all their love of the new, Japanese voters still have a deeply conservative streak. The not very efficient and certainly grossly overmanned post office with well over 25,000 branches throughout the country is an institution embedded in the Japanese way of life. Even though the Tokyo financial markets hardly skipped a beat at the election news, apparently convinced of Koizumi’s re-election, it could very well prove a close-run thing. If Koizumi is indeed victorious, Japan may never be the same again.
