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High Noon for Japan’s DPJ

Reading Time: 7 mins

In Brief

Japanese politics is heading for a showdown on 14th September when the ruling Democratic Party of Japan decides its next leader and prime minister. The contenders are the present incumbent, Prime Minister Kan Naoto, and the secretary-general in the previous Hatoyama administration, Ozawa Ichirō. If Ozawa is successful, Japan will have had three prime ministers in a little over three months.

The media have been waiting breathlessly for Ozawa’s decision on whether or not he would run for the DPJ leadership.

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A pointer to Ozawa’s likely move was his recent attendance at a big bash at former Prime Minister Hatoyama’s luxury villa in Karuizawa, the summer playground of the rich in Nagano Prefecture. Having disappeared from the political scene after the recent Upper House election (‘gone fishing’ according to some), Ozawa’s reappearance at such an occasion was designed for maximum effect.

Ozawa said his decision to enter the race was due to Hatoyama’s declaration of full support for his candidacy after a meeting on the 26th August. This must have come as a shock to Prime Minister Kan for whom Hatoyama had earlier pledged his backing. The former prime minister once again showed his capacity for flip-flopping on key decisions, a trait that marked his time in office.

Ozawa’s real reason for standing, however, is that he finds himself in an intolerable situation. He has been sidelined by Prime Minister Kan who told him in June to ‘be quiet for a while.’ This was a directive for Ozawa to remove himself from the political scene. Ozawa recently approached Kan requesting that he reverse his ‘escaping Ozawa’ (datsu Ozawa) policy line and agree to dismiss Chief Cabinet Secretary Sengoku Yoshito, but Kan chose to stand tough. As Ozawa explained, ‘I proposed party unity to Mr Kan but he did not listen at all. In order to break through the national crisis, I decided to stand for the election.’

What this means in practice is that the prime minister is not prepared to cede the kind of control over party, Diet and policy affairs that Ozawa exerted during the Hatoyama administration. Hatoyama was putty in Ozawa’s hands, but Kan is not. Moreover, elements in the DPJ (the so-called ‘seven magistrates,’ or nanabugyō) who are strongly anti-Ozawa and unwilling to allow him the kind of free hand that he had during the Hatoyama period, have grown stronger and bolder in Ozawa’s absence. Hence, in this respect, the face-off between Kan and Ozawa on the 14th is the battle that the DPJ had to have. It is a zero-sum game because Ozawa is not prepared to relinquish the power that he has wielded over the DPJ and its government no matter what formal position he held.

Another factor weighing heavily on Ozawa’s mind is whether or not the Tokyo No. 5 Committee for the Inquest of the Prosecution will decide to recommend that he be indicted over the political funding scandal for which three of his aides were arrested. He may reason that if he is prime minister he becomes less vulnerable to legal processes (Article 75 of the Constitution requires prime ministerial consent for legal action against any minister of state during their tenure of office). However, this discounts the impact of popular opinion, which is quite capable of driving leaders from office. In earlier decades, prime ministerial position did not protect either Tanaka Kakuei or Takeshita Noboru in financial scandals.

Alternatively Ozawa may be figuring that a Kan prime ministership might capitalise on his indictment by the public prosecutors to fatally weaken his position in the party, so he needs a position of strength from which to protect himself from intra-party attack. This makes his bid for the party leadership a ‘do-or-die,’ ‘all-or-nothing’ attempt for Ozawa. In the past, Ozawa would have found a plausible stooge to put up for prime ministerial office as a front man, but at this time, no obvious candidates have revealed themselves.

As for the likely outcome of the election, providing the ‘groups’ within the DPJ parliamentary party reliably vote as blocs, the numbers are not looking good for Kan. On early indications, Ozawa has the support of the Ozawa group (150), the Hatoyama group (60), the Hata group (20), making a total of 230, while Kan has the support of the Kan group (50), the Maehara/Sengoku group (40) and the Noda group (30), making a total of 120 — a little over a half of Ozawa’s numbers. As yet undecided are the groups of ex-Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) and ex-Japan Socialist Party (JSP) members (with about 30 each). It is also unknown which way the 20 or so DPJ members close to Tarutoko Shinji (who himself stood for the DPJ leadership last June) will vote.

The voting system for the party leadership is, however, larger and more complicated than a simple reckoning of which way the votes of DPJ parliamentarians will go. Each of the 412 DPJ Diet members has a vote that counts for two points (making a total of 824 points), while the 2,382 DPJ local assembly members’ votes count in total for 100 points, and the 342,493 party members and supporters’ votes count in total for 300 points (one per Lower House single-member district). The fact that the election has some characteristics of a local primary means that the opinions of local politicians and rank and file members will matter and may prompt some DPJ parliamentarians to break ranks, defy the recommendations of their group leaders and align themselves with local sentiment. This is exactly the phenomenon that put Koizumi into the LDP prime ministership in 2001. It may count in Kan’s favour given that the popular momentum is with the prime minister whose standing in the public opinion polls is rising. On the other hand, it may go Ozawa’s way. He reputedly has a war chest of ¥300 billion for just this kind of exercise and spent a lot of time during the recent Upper House election campaign shoring up his own support amongst DPJ affiliates in the localities.

In the short term, the leadership election will divide the DPJ along pro- and anti-Ozawa lines. In this respect, Ozawa clearly does not care what his candidacy will do to his own party. Although he is trying to portray himself as a saviour of party unity, he is in fact prepared to sacrifice this in order to maintain his own position of power. He has done exactly the same thing before on a number of occasions. His reputation for being a ‘destroyer’ is largely attributed to the way he split and/or brought down the LDP in 1993, the Renewal Party in 1994 and the New Frontier Party in 1998.

Over the medium term, the contest could rend the DPJ asunder. If Ozawa loses the race, it’s quite possible that he will take his bat (his position as the DPJ’s supreme power broker) and ball (his followers) out of the party, possibly setting off another round of party realignment, and/or bringing down the government and forcing another Lower House election. This makes the DPJ leadership election an ‘end game’ for both Ozawa and the DPJ. Even though Ozawa will try to portray the battle as being one fought over policy differences with Kan and attribute the highest motives to himself (eg. ‘saving the country’ and ‘saving the DPJ’), in reality the fight will be all about maintaining his political power. Moreover, given Ozawa’s widespread unpopularity amongst general voters, the leadership contest could hark back to the bad old days when the LDP inflicted their factional choices on the electorate regardless of popular opinion.

The larger significance of the leadership election is that Japan and the DPJ are facing a choice between ‘old’ (Ozawa-style) and ‘new’ (Kan-style) politics. In this respect, the contest may be a turning point in Japanese politics.

Aurelia George Mulgan is Professor of Politics at the Australian Defence Force Academy of the University of New South Wales in Canberra.

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