Japan’s Premier Faces Prospect of Minority Government

Japanese Prime Minister Tsutomu Hata faces the prospect today of forming a minority government lacking authority at home and credibility abroad.

Rejected on one side by the Socialists, who bolted the nation’s ruling coalition early Tuesday, and condemned on the other by the Liberal Democrats, Japan’s rulers from 1955 to 1993, Hata failed for a second day to form a Cabinet and participate in a ratification ceremony in the presence of Emperor Akihito.

A policy speech he had been scheduled to deliver also was postponed indefinitely.

Without the imperial ceremony, limited power to implement routine business remains in the hands of former Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa and his Cabinet ministers, all of whom resigned Monday before Parliament elected Hata prime minister.

In effect, Japan--a nation that, with the same party controlling the government for 38 years, enjoyed such stability that critics charged it was not a real democracy--had no functioning government. And a return of stability and credible government was nowhere in sight.

Stripped of assured support from its former partners--the Socialists and the New Party Harbinger, which earlier declared it would not join the new Cabinet--the four parties and three splinter groups now in the coalition hold only 37% of the seats in the lower house and 24% in the upper house.

Such a government would be able to pass legislation only with help from its opponents and would lack international credibility to carry out promises. A plan to present to the United States in June a program of economic policies to substantially reduce Japan’s trade surplus appeared threatened.

Supporters and opponents of the coalition agreed that the 1994 budget must be enacted quickly, offering hope that opponents might not try to throw the coalition out of office until the budget is passed, probably in June.

The Yomiuri newspaper today reported a growing possibility that the lower house will be dissolved and a general election held after the budget is passed.

Budgets normally are submitted to Parliament in late January and approved by late March before the fiscal year begins April 1. Japan is operating on an interim budget, and deliberations on the spending bill have not begun.

Yoshiro Mori, the Liberal Democrats’ secretary general, urged Hata to decline his designation by Parliament as prime minister. Meanwhile, the party’s president, Yohei Kono, offered to cooperate with the Socialists and the New Party Harbinger, while Socialist Chairman Tomiichi Murayama made the same offer to the Liberal Democrats and Harbinger.

Hata continued his efforts to persuade the Socialists to rescind their decision. But his pleas fell on deaf ears.

Murayama declared that the Socialists’ former partners had broken faith with his party, which holds 74 seats in the lower house, by secretly establishing a 130-member “parliamentary negotiation bloc”--which acts like a single political party in Parliament.

Establishment of the bloc, “which must have been planned some time ago,” was an attempt to “contain the Socialists” through “the power of numbers,” he charged.

Socialist Vice Chairman Jun Oide declared: “We won’t go back. The only path is to create a new political structure.”

Coalition hopes that a rebellion might develop within the Socialist Party also faded. The party’s central committee, a caucus of its members of Parliament and even its most conservative faction all officially approved Murayama’s decision to withdraw from the coalition. Party executives also rejected a coalition offer to abolish the controversial negotiating bloc if they would return to the government.