Coalition Leader Elected Japan’s Prime Minister

After 34 hours of obstructionism and an invalid round of balloting, lawmakers late Friday finally elected Morihiro Hosokawa as Japan’s new prime minister.

The balloting in the lower house of Parliament ended 38 years of rule by the Liberal Democratic Party, launched an opposition-led coalition into power and ushered in a new generation of leaders.

Hosokawa, 55, is a rebel from the Liberal Democrats who formed a grass-roots reform party only 15 months ago.

With seven parties supporting him, Hosokawa defeated Yohei Kono, 56, the new Liberal Democrat president, by a vote of 262 to 224 in the fight to replace Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, 73.

Communist Chairman Tetsuzo Fuwa polled 15 votes from his own party, and Socialist Chairman Sadao Yamahana, a coalition partner, got two votes. Eight legislators were absent.

The coalition pasted together a nine-seat majority in the powerful 511-member house. Hosokawa, who became Japan’s youngest prime minister since 1972, is scheduled to announce his Cabinet on Monday.

“A change of governments has long been the people’s dream,” Hosokawa said of Japan’s first coalition since 1948. “But there also is uneasiness toward the unknown. I hope to wipe out that concern as quickly as possible.”

The balloting occurred nearly 34 hours behind schedule, because the outgoing Liberal Democrats refused to accept the new coalition’s decision to choose one of its own members--former Socialist Chairwoman Takako Doi--as Speaker of the lower house.

But even after the obstructionist demand was withdrawn, a miscue voided the first vote on the prime minister.

A clerk, calling the legislators to cast their ballots, accidentally flipped past a page of 50 names. The clerk noticed the mistake and read the missing page at the end of the list of legislators, but two Liberal Democrats complained that their names had not been called.

Doi, who was elected as Japan’s first female Speaker by a majority of nine votes, ordered the procedure to start again after a recess.

Hosokawa’s victory, analysts said, transformed Japan from a country of predictable stability into one with a cloudy political outlook and a potentially shaky government. But his coalition offered a stronger promise of political and electoral reform than at any time since the Liberal Democrats started ruling in 1955.

The coalition already has announced plans to hammer out an agreement on details of its proposed reforms in the 10-day session of Parliament that began Thursday. Legislation would then be submitted in September and enacted by October.

Little else is clear about the coalition’s intentions. The splintered opposition came together after the Liberal Democrats split over the reform issue in June and then lost their majority in a July 18 election.

The coalition has pledged to continue Japan’s foreign and security policies, which stress the primacy of ties with the United States.

In Washington, the Clinton Administration welcomed Hosokawa’s election. “We look forward to working with him on a host of bilateral, regional issues we’ve got going,” White House spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers told Reuters news agency.

The Japanese coalition has also talked about new measures to spur the stagnated economy. And it has supported a host of broad goals, such as transferring central government powers to regional administrations.

But on details it has been “fuzzy,” as Shintaro Ishihara of the Liberal Democratic Party charged during the election campaign.

“Fuzzy logic is fine in a refrigerator, but it is no good in a political party,” Ishihara complained of Hosokawa’s Japan New Party.

Some political analysts predicted that failure of the bold coalition experiment could bring the Liberal Democrats back into power in the next election, which is expected within 12 months.

But others have noted that the outgoing rulers themselves have been little more than a coalition of factions that brought together bands of legislators under bosses, each of whom sought the prime minister’s post himself and dispersed lesser posts and funds to rank-and-file followers.

Now, the faction bosses will have no government posts and fewer funds to disperse. Business executives already have announced they will start dividing up their political donations among the Liberal Democrats and three new conservative parties that entered the opposition alliance. Deprived of the power that has been a major source of their unity, the Liberal Democrats could disintegrate further.

Ironically, the change of government will give control of both houses of Parliament to the same political force for the first time since 1989.

The Liberal Democrats lost their majority in the upper house four years ago in a voters’ rebellion over taxes and scandals. Since then, they have been forced to bargain for support from some segment of the opposition to enact all bills, except the budget and treaties, which do not require upper house approval.

The pro forma balloting for the prime minister in the upper house gave Hosokawa 132 votes, or a majority of six in that 252-member chamber.

Ichiro Ozawa, a former Liberal Democratic Party secretary general who is expected to act as a leading strategist for the new government, predicted that the coalition will last longer and function more smoothly than expected. He said the new government will find responding to American trade complaints one of its biggest challenges.

“But we will have to deal with the complaints positively,” he said.

Japan’s New Power

Morihiro Hosokawa’s biggest challenge now lies within his own fragile alliance, spanning a wide spectrum of political parties from the center-right to the Socialists. Here is how they line up:

COALITION MEMBERS

Lower house Upper house Socialists/Socialist Democratic Federation 77 73 Japan Renewal Party 60 8 Komei (Clean Government) Party 52 24 Harbinger/Japan New Party 52 4 Democratic Socialists 19 11 Democratic Reform Party -- 11 Subtotal 260 131

NON-COALITION

Lower house Upper house Liberal Democrats 228 99 Communists 15 11 Niin Club -- 5 Unaffiliated 8 6 Subtotal 251 121 Total seats 511 252

The Socialists and the Socialist Democratic Federation, on one hand, and the Japan New Party and the New Party Harbinger, on the other, both registered as a single political bargaining unit. Source: House of Representatives, Proceedings Section