Japanese Premier Retakes Lower House of Parliament

Riding a wave of defections from a rival party, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party on Friday recaptured control of the lower house of parliament after a four-year hiatus.

It was a major symbolic victory for Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, who can claim much of the credit for rescuing his party from the rout it suffered in 1993, when a rebellion led by a rival divided the party that had ruled Japan since 1955 and tossed the LDP out of power.

With Hashimoto’s star rising and his approval ratings high 20 months into his tenure, political analysts said Friday that the prime minister now must use his growing political muscle to push through his promised reforms.

Tsugadai University political scientist Norihiko Narita compared Hashimoto to a chef who has handed his customers a tantalizing menu and disappeared into the kitchen. “The public hasn’t yet been served the meal,” Narita said. “Hashimoto is still cooking.”

Hashimoto was visiting Beijing on Friday when Naoto Kitamura, a Hokkaido lawmaker, announced that he was tipping the balance of power in favor of the LDP.

Kitamura had been among the disgruntled LDP members who defected and helped bring down the government of then-Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa in 1993, but he quit the breakaway New Frontier Party in May. His departure, the 11th since last fall, gives the LDP 250 seats in the 500-member House of Representatives. The LDP has a functional majority because it also controls the seat held by Speaker Soichiro Ito. An LDP loyalist, Ito became an independent--as tradition requires--when he took the post. Five other parties and independents hold the other 249 seats.

LDP Secretary-General Koichi Kato said Friday that the party will continue its ideologically strained alliance with its old coalition partners, the Social Democratic Party and New Party Harbinger.

While Hashimoto has been effective in luring disgruntled lower-house lawmakers of the New Frontier Party back to the LDP fold, analysts said he cannot expect to woo enough defectors to retake the upper house, the House of Councillors, where the LDP now controls only 113 of the 252 seats.

He needs the upper house to pass much of the vital legislation to effect his administrative reforms and lead the LDP to victory next July, when half the seats in the upper chamber will be up for grabs.

Moreover, although Hashimoto may be emboldened by his political successes, analysts said, he still faces major obstacles: a sharply factionalized LDP, a belt-tightening budget, a lackluster economy, reemerging trade tensions with the United States, and bureaucrats and vested interests likely to do their utmost to try to block his proposed package of deregulation and administrative reforms.

But the LDP’s growing clout will make it easier for Hashimoto to brush aside the socialists and push through approval of new defense guidelines, scheduled to be released later this month, that will spell out what kinds of assistance Japan would offer the United States in the event of a security crisis in Asia, said John Neuffer, author of Behind the Screen, a political newsletter.

The Social Democrats want a narrow interpretation of Japan’s “peace constitution,” and their traditional passivism clashes with the more hawkish LDP stance.

Likewise, the lower-house majority will make it easier for Hashimoto to introduce legislation this fall requiring Japanese citizens to pick up more of the cost of their health care. That plan is anathema to the socialists, said analyst Hiroshi Takaku of the Japan Center for International Exchange.

However, both of these issues are being hotly debated within the LDP. Making matters more complicated, the LDP’s five competing factions are each internally divided on whether to maintain the LDP-Social Democrat-Harbinger alliance or ally with conservatives.