Japan’s Socialists Elect Right-Winger as Chief

Makoto Tanabe, 69, who pledged to adopt realistic policies and transform Japan’s Socialist Party into one that voters can trust to take over the government, won a surprisingly narrow victory to become the new chairman of the perennial opposition leaders, vote-counting revealed Tuesday.

Although backed by Rengo--the Japanese trade union confederation and the Socialists’ main support group, with 8 million members--and heavily favored before balloting Sunday and Monday, the party’s vice chairman won only 56% of the votes cast.

Tanabe, a right-winger, polled 46,363 votes against 36,358 for Tetsu Ueda, 63, a left-winger who campaigned against a party reform plan that Tanabe drew up in June. Ueda demanded that the Socialists stick to their traditional policy of unarmed neutralism.

Tanabe is the first right-winger to win the Socialist chairman’s post in 26 years. But the hefty support for Ueda underscored the strength of Marxist-imbued party members at the grass-roots level.

Ueda’s showing was expected to force Tanabe to accept revisions in his reform plan when a party convention votes on the plan next Tuesday and Wednesday. It also portends a new round of factional infighting as the party faces an important election next summer for the upper house of Parliament, in which Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party lost its majority in 1989.

“The results show that we failed to explain the reform plan sufficiently,” said Tanabe’s campaign manager, Tsuneto Kobayashi.

The election was called after Takako Doi, 62, the first woman ever to head a major political party in Japan, resigned in June. Although the party under her leadership rose from a devastating defeat in 1986 to score impressively in national elections in 1989 and 1990, voters became disillusioned with Doi’s opposition to both monetary and manpower contributions to the U.S.-led Gulf War and her inability to pull the party away from many of its Marxist-colored policies.

Last April, the party suffered its worst-ever defeat in local elections and saw its support in opinion polls dwindle to 11%. Socialists hold only 27% of the seats in the powerful lower house of Parliament, which elects the prime minister, but rank as the largest of four major opposition groups.

Tanabe reiterated his intent to reform the party, which has been unable to field enough candidates to win national elections, and “open the door to taking over the government.” But he acknowledged that the thin margin of victory affirms that “criticism and misunderstanding” of his reforms “exists among party members.”

Ueda, who drew only 16.7% of the votes against Doi when she was elected in 1986, said he had won strong support by campaigning “on the premise that (Tanabe’s) reform plan had not been approved” by the party at large. Last Saturday, Ueda announced that he intended to submit his own reform plan.

During the campaign, he declared that the key issue was whether the Socialists would accept revision of Japan’s postwar constitution, which bans the maintenance of armed forces, or whether they would remain “defenders of the constitution.”

Tanabe insisted that he shares Ueda’s commitment to the ideal of forgoing the maintenance of armed forces. His reform plan, however, overturns the party’s opposition to sending troops overseas to participate in disaster relief and U.N.-sponsored peacekeeping activities.

Tanabe, who will serve out the remainder of Doi’s term, will face another possible election before an end-of-the-year party convention.