Japanese Coalition Plan Stalled Over Job Offer

Efforts to cobble together a coalition government between Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party and a conservative opposition party looked more like a forced marriage today, with the two sides divided on an array of issues.

One of the most important rifts keeping them from consummating their ties, aimed at ensuring the survival of the unpopular government of Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, is over the Cabinet post being offered to the feisty Ichiro Ozawa.

Ozawa, leader of the Liberal Party, reportedly is miffed at the offer of the home affairs portfolio, a comparatively junior post that he held a decade ago.

The job that analysts say he covets is that of deputy prime minister, a position where he could steer national policy and overshadow Obuchi.

“Ozawa is being insulted. It’s the kind of samurai-style loss of face that in the old days triggered spectacular revenge,” said commentator Minoru Morita.

“The villain who is causing this loss of face for Ozawa is the majority of people in the LDP who hate him,” Morita said.

Ozawa has been the sworn enemy of a broad cross-section of the LDP since he led a mass defection in 1993 that prompted the party’s fall from power after 38 years in office. Many party insiders said an alliance with him would be anathema.

The dilemma for the mild-mannered prime minister is that he has publicly pushed for the pragmatically motivated tie-up, and a failure would rebound on him and his aides.

Ozawa’s party holds 38 lower house and 12 upper house seats, which the LDP desperately wants so it can ensure its own political future in a nation stuck in its worst recession since World War II.

To try to salvage the arrangement, the two sides agreed to set up five teams to discuss thorny issues such as defense, with the hawkish Ozawa pressing for a broader military role than the LDP feels comfortable with.

On Monday, Obuchi’s right-hand man, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiromu Nonaka, told reporters that if Ozawa’s Liberals sought to change Japan’s peace-oriented constitution, the coalition talks would return to square one.

“It’s not so much Ozawa who is standing in the way of the coalition, it is the LDP trying to find out what it can live with,” said analyst John Neuffer. “It’s the LDP moving the goal posts and taking the old tactic of backsliding.”

On Monday, Ozawa registered rage at the LDP for rolling back on promises on national security and for a diminished role for the bureaucracy in parliamentary deliberations.

In the meantime, the only way to get Ozawa back on its side is for the LDP to assuage his hurt feelings and sweeten the Cabinet post deal, Morita said.

“The LDP wants his cooperation in the next elections, whenever they are, and so they will probably offer as a compromise a decent post to Ozawa’s number two, (Liberal Party Secretary-General Takeshi) Noda,” Morita said.

The trade portfolio is the most talked-about possibility.

In any event, any LDP-Liberal liaison is bound to be fraught with turmoil and could be short-lived, Neuffer said.

“What we’re seeing suggests that it’s going to be a prickly relationship if it finally comes together,” Neuffer said. “But Ozawa is a pretty unpredictable guy and he could walk out any time.”