Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Political shake up in Japan...

  Yukio Hatoyama quit as Japan’s prime minister less than nine months after ending a rival party’s 50- year lock on power as money scandals and a broken promise to move U.S. troops cost him the support of four in five voters.

“In some cases the efforts of our party haven’t reached the hearts of the people,” Hatoyama, 63, said in a speech to Democratic Party of Japan lawmakers. Ichiro Ozawa, the party’s campaign strategist and most senior official, will also step down. Stocks fell and the yen weakened on concern political instability may hamper efforts to cut Japan’s public debt, the world’s largest, ahead of mid-term elections next month.

Hatoyama’s term was the shortest for a Japanese leader since 1994, and his resignation will force parliament to select the nation’s fifth prime minister in four years. The DPJ in August unseated the Liberal Democratic Party, which governed almost without interruption for more than 50 years.

The party will choose a new head on June 4, who would become prime minister because of the DPJ’s majority in parliament. Finance Minister Naoto Kan, 63, said today he plans to run. Other likely candidates include National Strategy Minister Yoshito Sengoku, 64, and Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada, 56, said Steven R. Reed, a political science professor at Chuo University in Tokyo.

“This is purely an election ploy,” said Yasunori Sone, political science professor at Keio University in Tokyo. “Kan will probably be the next prime minister, and his mission is to avoid a bad defeat so he can remain.”

Dilute The Power

The end of the Hatoyama administration highlights the difficulties of achieving political change in Japan, which has suffered four recessions and persistent deflation since 1990. Hatoyama led his party into office with a promise to dilute the power of the bureaucracy and shift public spending to people rather than infrastructure investment. The DPJ-backed childcare stipends to families are starting this month.

Still, the prime minister failed to deliver on other vows. His self-imposed deadline for resolving the Okinawa base issue prompted him to take two trips to the island in May in a fruitless effort to win understanding from local officials.

“I worked for half a year to try and move the bases off Okinawa, but wasn’t able to do so,” Hatoyama said during his speech.

Lost Credibility

Hatoyama lost credibility with voters after breaking a campaign promise by deciding last week to uphold an accord reached between a previous LDP-led administration and Washington to keep U.S. forces in Okinawa. The decision angered the Social Democratic Party of Japan, which abandoned the coalition government in protest, and drove the prime minister’s support ratings to 20 percent, comparable to predecessor Taro Aso’s just before the LDP’s defeat last summer.

“This is not the first time I’ve seen an underperforming prime minister. Japan has to change and he obviously hasn’t changed with the current environment, thus the low approval rating,” said Winston Barnes, head of sales and trading for Asian markets at WJB Capital Group Inc. in San Francisco.

Polls show voters as likely to vote for the LDP as the DPJ in the July contest for half the 242 seats in the upper chamber of parliament. Outrage over Hatoyama’s handling of the Futenma Marine Air base deployment issue overshadowed reports showing the world’s second-largest economy is rebounding.

Since taking office in September, he had come to be seen as an indecisive leader. This image was reinforced by his wavering and eventual backtracking on the base issue, which set off huge demonstrations on Okinawa and drove his approval ratings below 25 percent.

Calls had been rising within his Democratic Party for him to step aside before elections on July 11 that are seen as a referendum on the party’s first year in power.

“Unfortunately, the politics of the ruling party did not find reflection in the hearts of the people,” Mr. Hatoyama told an emergency meeting of Democratic lawmakers, broadcast live on television. “It is regrettable that the people were gradually unwilling to listen to us.”

Mr. Hatoyama is the fourth Japanese prime minister to resign in four years, which is likely to renew soul-searching about Japan’s inability to produce an effective leader and to feed concerns that political paralysis is preventing Japan from reversing a nearly two-decade-long economic decline. Mr. Hatoyama, who was teary-eyed as he announced his departure, was also following the common Japanese practice of leaders’ resigning to take responsibility for failure.

His resignation will not force a change in government, because the Democrats still hold a commanding majority in Parliament’s Lower House, which chooses the prime minister. But it will be a damaging blow to a party that had taken power in a landslide election victory that ended more than a half-century of nearly unbroken one-party control.

Mr. Hatoyama took power with vows to challenge the bureaucracy’s grip on postwar governing and revive Japan’s economy. Instead, his inexperienced government appeared to become consumed by the issue of the Okinawa base and a series of investigations into the political financing of Mr. Hatoyama and his backer in the party, Ichiro Ozawa.

Mr. Hatoyama said Wednesday that Mr. Ozawa, the Democratic Party’s secretary general and its shadowy power broker, would also resign. Japan’s public broadcaster, NHK, said the party would meet Friday to choose a new prime minister. Candidates include party veterans Naoto Kan, the finance minister, and Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada.

The contention over the American base, which dragged on for months, was emblematic of Mr. Hatoyama’s inability to make up his mind, or follow through on ambitious campaign promises.

The Democrats failed to deliver on a number of pledges, from eliminating highway tolls to finding enough savings from cutting waste to finance new subsidies like cash allowances for families with children. Instead, the spending ended up raising concerns that Japan’s ballooning deficit could one day lead to a Greek-style financial collapse.

Mr. Hatoyama had been expected to be a diplomatic personality who would be able to build consensus among the members of his ideologically broad party. He had appeared to be naturally suited to the job, as a political blue blood who hailed from one of Japan’s most powerful families. His grandfather had been a founding member of the Liberal Democratic Party, whose long grip on power Mr. Hatoyama’s Democrats ended last summer.

He was critic of American-style globalization, and talked of transforming Japan’s public works-driven politics into something closer to a European-style social welfare state. During the election campaign, he had drawn attention by pledging to end Japan’s postwar dependence on the United States, and to build closer ties with China and the rest of Asia. His vow to build a more equal partnership with Washington was symbolized by his pledge to move the United States Marine Air Station Futenma and its noisy helicopters off Okinawa, or out of Japan altogether.

In the end, it was the base, and a prolonged dispute with Washington, that proved Mr. Hatoyama’s undoing.

Japan’s public did not support altering the military alliance with the United States at a time when neighboring North Korea was testing nuclear weapons, and an increasingly assertive China was sending warships on training exercises near Japanese islands.

 
 

Posted via email from Jim Nichols

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