Japan Can’t Agree on Need for New Cabinet : Asia: Murayama and coalition partners waffle after election shows they are supported by only 20% of voters. It is the worst turnout in history.

As business people here fired a barrage of criticism at the government, Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama and his coalition partners today failed to agree on whether they will form a new Cabinet to try to energize an administration supported by only 20% of Japanese voters.

Whether to name new ministers will be decided after Aug. 4, when the current Cabinet fixes a ceiling for requests for next year’s budget, Chief Cabinet Secretary Kozo Igarashi said.

The waffling came in the wake of Sunday’s election for the upper house of Parliament, the first national ballot since the left-right Cabinet headed by Murayama, a Socialist, came to power in June, 1994.

Analysts traced the indecision to unrest in the Liberal Democratic Party, the largest coalition member. It focuses on LDP leader Yohei Kono, the foreign minister. Any shuffling of Cabinet posts, they said, is likely to trigger demands for a change in party officials only a month before Kono must face an election for party president when his two-year term expires.

Although the three coalition parties won a majority of the seats at stake, only 20.1% of all voters voted for their candidates in the worst turnout in history. Of voters who went to the polls, only 48% supported the coalition parties. Worst of all was the Socialists’ showing--support from 17% of voters who cast ballots and only 7% of all voters. Murayama’s party won only 13% of the seats at stake.

Tsutomu Hotta, a retired prosecutor, said Murayama’s Cabinet had received a “suspended sentence” from the voters.

Murayama himself acknowledged that the election showed that “distrust in politics has heightened.” Finance Minister Masayoshi Takemura, head of the New Party Harbinger, the third member of the coalition, declared that the Cabinet “must adopt a stronger posture in favor of reform” of both the economy and the government administration.

Shoichiro Toyoda, chairman of Keidanren (Federation of Economic Organizations), said the election showed “there are many people who are not satisfied with the coalition’s policies.”

“I hope that the coalition will take the results seriously and aggressively carry out tax reforms on an emergency basis, enact a large-scale supplementary budget and abolish government regulations” to stimulate an economy now in its fourth year of virtually no growth, said Toyoda, who is also chairman of Toyota Motor Co.

Jiro Ushio, chairman of the Japan Assn. of Corporate Executives, called for Murayama’s replacement by a leader of the Liberal Democratic Party and “an immediate general election.”

Kosaku Inaba, chairman of the Japan Chamber of Commerce, urged the government to stop using the coalition as “an excuse” for avoiding decisive actions and implementing only compromises. He also urged the government “to seek the people’s judgment” in an election for the lower house, which elects the prime minister.

No general election has been held since July, 1993, when the Liberal Democrats’ 38-year unilateral grasp on power ended, and Murayama reiterated Monday that he was not thinking of calling one in the near future.

Jiro Nemoto, chairman of the Federation of Employers Assns., called the record low voter turnout of 44.5% “a problem for the maintenance of a healthy democracy.”

He said it showed that the people were “giving a cold shoulder” to politics. But unlike other business people, Nemoto criticized voters for lacking the will to participate in carrying out reforms.

A poll for NHK television reported that 49% of voters do not support Murayama’s decision to stay in office; only 26% back it, the semi-governmental network reported.