Maverick Looks Set to Be Japan’s Prime Minister

Quixotic reformer Junichiro Koizumi is virtually certain to become Japan’s next prime minister after a groundswell of grass-roots support over the weekend ensured his election today as ruling-party president.

Normally obedient rank-and-file members of the Liberal Democratic Party, which has ruled Japan for most of the last five decades, defied power brokers and slammed home the message that without a new way of doing things, the LDP can’t survive.

“We’re in a crisis situation,” said Tomiji Okamoto, chief secretary of the LDP’s Tokushima branch. “If the LDP doesn’t change, this country is in really big trouble.”

Koizumi secured 123 of 141 votes allocated to local party chapters in the first phase of voting conducted last weekend. His chief rival, former Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, collected just 15. LDP lawmakers today picked Koizumi as their president in a second-phase vote.

Later this week, the LDP-controlled parliament will elect a new prime minister; Koizumi’s elevation is so widely expected that speculation has now turned to the makeup of his Cabinet.

The weekend general election was closed to the general public, but that wasn’t evident from the interest it stirred among normally apathetic Japanese voters. The media, which generally dislike Hashimoto’s perceived arrogance and tendency to blame reporters for a wide range of ills, also played a key role in the outcome as they made little secret of their preference for Koizumi.

“The media’s power was really much greater than we expected,” said Satoru Noto, secretary-general of Aomori prefecture’s LDP chapter.

If elected, Koizumi will have to show he can govern--and live up to his pledge to bring real change to Japan. This nation has a poor record when it comes to political reformers producing results, especially those without the backing of the large LDP blocs that Koizumi has vowed to defang.

“In the past, the LDP has treated reformers like pariahs,” said Hidekazu Kawai, a political science professor at Tokyo’s Gakushuin University.

In the interest of political survival, the LDP mainstream will almost certainly support Koizumi until an upper house election July 28. The outgoing administration of Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori has seen its popularity sink to single-digit percentages, the economy is entering its 11th year of downturn, and the party has been trounced in several recent gubernatorial elections after a string of scandals.

After late July, however, the long knives could come out if Koizumi hasn’t neutralized his intraparty opponents. Koizumi’s calls for reform have not won him many points among LDP traditionalists who still wield substantial power.

Among his more controversial proposals is a bid to privatize the post office, which oversees the world’s biggest bank, with more than $2 trillion in assets. The LDP has long used the system as an unofficial arm of the party and a conduit for funding inefficient companies partially run by the state.

Koizumi also will be under strong pressure to show some concrete evidence of change relatively soon or risk disenchanting the public. So far, he’s provided few specifics on how he would reform the economy and what he would do with the flood of unemployed that would almost surely follow any efficiency push.

Some see a permanent shift emerging in the power balance between local and central LDP officials, and ultimately the way politics is conducted in Japan. “This is not just a change in the wind. It’s more like a typhoon,” said Okamoto, of the Tokushima chapter.

Koizumi, the son and grandson of lawmakers, was born in 1942 and attended prestigious Keio University. He studied politics and economics in London and was elected to parliament in 1972. He was health and welfare minister in the early 1990s.

Koizumi married in 1978--the cake was shaped like Japan’s parliament building--and divorced five years later, maintaining custody of the couple’s two boys. His permed salt-and-pepper hair is something of a trademark these days. He’s a big fan of Winston Churchill, classical music and the Japanese pop group X-Japan, known for its heavy-metal ballads. Not surprisingly, he’s been labeled an eccentric.

“Now the whole LDP has bet on the heretic,” said political analyst Takao Iwami.

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Weeks ago, top party officials reportedly decided that Hashimoto should be the next premier.

To give the election a democratic veneer, senior party officials allocated slightly less than 30% of the votes to local chapters, expecting that they could contain any dissent.

“But this time the old tactics didn’t work,” said Hiroshi Takaku, an independent political analyst. “This was a grass-roots revolt.”

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Makiko Inoue of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.