After Win, Japan’s LDP Faces New Challenges

Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party faces two new challenges after winning a scant majority in parliamentary elections: how to shed the unpopular prime minister who is blamed for the lackluster showing, and how to handle its coalition partner, which has suddenly become a more powerful player.

The drumbeat to dump Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori throbbed through the Japanese media on Monday, the day after the elections. Television stations ran footage of the burly rugby player’s scowling face, and headlines on major newspapers made it clear that the LDP’s victory was regarded as a tenuous one.

The Yomiuri newspaper, Japan’s largest-circulation daily, quoted unidentified sources in some of the losing LDP campaigns as blaming Mori for their defeat.

Like a Typhoid Mary of Japanese politics, Mori is thought to have hurt the candidates for whom he made campaign appearances. According to the newspaper’s statistics, 25 of the candidates the prime minister stumped for won, but 45 were defeated.

“We heard that when our opponent in the [opposition] Democratic Party of Japan heard the prime minister was coming to stump for us, he did a little dance,” a staffer for one losing Tokyo candidate told the newspaper. “We thought we were neck and neck, so maybe it was his visit on the last day of the campaign that lost it for us.”

The LDP lost strength in the powerful lower house of parliament, but by winning 233 of the 480 seats it did just well enough that Mori does not have to resign. But it did not do well enough to run parliament’s committees without help from its controversial coalition partner, the Buddhist-backed New Komeito.

As politicians and pundits sifted through the electoral tea leaves on Monday, many agreed that the LDP must install a new prime minister to lead it into elections for parliament’s upper house scheduled for July 2001, or face certain disaster.

“If Mori doesn’t quit, the LDP is in trouble. They need to get rid of him,” said Takao Iwami, a political analyst for the Mainichi newspaper. “Everybody thinks Mori is the worst prime minister since the [Second World] War.

“But it’s going to be very difficult to get rid of him, because the people who made him prime minister are still there,” Iwami said. “He won’t quit himself, because he wants to be prime minister for as long as possible. . . . At the moment, there is no solution.”

Even though Japan is a parliamentary system, it has no set mechanism for forcing out a prime minister, however unpopular, before his term is up, said Norihiko Narita, professor of politics at Surugadai University. The only way to get rid of him is to blame him for some disaster--or make him so miserable he quits.

“It would be very hard to remove him before the upper house elections if he refuses to quit,” Narita said.

LDP Secretary-General Hiromu Nonaka was one of the kingmakers who picked Mori in a frantic midnight session in a hotel room in April as the late Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi lay comatose after suffering a stroke. Nonaka had promised to resign if the LDP won fewer than 229 seats. On Monday, after the party won four seats more than that, Nonaka said that any responsibility for the election results was his own.

An unidentified Komeito official was quoted as saying that Mori’s gaffes before and during the campaign might have contributed to the Komeito’s own losses. The party finished with 31 seats, down from 42 before the elections.

Mori drew international criticism for calling Japan “a divine nation with the emperor at its center.” The remark was seen as endorsing state Shintoism, and went down poorly with the Soka Gakkai, the Buddhist group that backs the Komeito and that was persecuted by pro-Shinto authorities during Japan’s militaristic period. Mori quickly made amends.

The coalition is unpopular with some LDP rank and file, who dislike the Komeito’s proselytizing, or the commingling of religion with politics.

But the LDP needed the support of the Komeito’s disciplined voters to win Sunday’s elections, and the Komeito appeared to have delivered. Without the Komeito, the LDP could not command an absolute majority in either house of parliament, making its junior partner much more powerful than it was before the elections, analysts agreed.

However, the LDP incurred a debt in Sunday’s elections and may have to make concessions to the Komeito, professor Narita said.

The Komeito, which traditionally represented lower-income voters, has long emphasized the need for increased social welfare spending. It may seek to have some of the billions of dollars the LDP plans to spend to stimulate the economy allocated for programs such as child-care allowances, which would benefit the urban poor, rather than for the traditional LDP public works projects that benefit rural voters, Narita said.

A newly reelected Komeito lawmaker, Isamu Ueda, said the party’s main goals will be stimulating the weak economy and undertaking a systematic review of Japan’s underfunded pension system.

Ueda said policy differences between the Komeito and the LDP have narrowed. That’s because aging LDP backers--farmers and shopkeepers--have become more worried about pension and welfare issues, he said, while Komeito voters have seen their living standards rise.

“Our interests are getting closer,” Ueda said.

Mori is reportedly planning next week to reshuffle the Cabinet he inherited from Obuchi. Two LDP Cabinet members lost their seats Sunday, and Mori is expected to offer one seat each to the Komeito and to the New Conservative Party, another ally, which won seven seats.