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Japan election gives old Liberal Democratic Party new lease on life
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Japan election gives old Liberal Democratic Party new lease on life
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has propelled his recalcitrant party into a modern era of image politics and strong leadership with a stunning election victory that has some wondering whether voters will ever abandon the party that has ruled Japan for most of the past half century.
In a landslide victory that vindicated his gamble to appeal to voters to back his pet project of privatising the postal system, Koizumi’s conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) won a whopping 296 seats in the 480-member lower house of parliament. Coalition partner New Komeito took 31 seats, allowing the ruling bloc to dominate the powerful chamber with majorities in all its committees and override the upper house if need be.
That dwarfed the main opposition Democratic Party, which lost 62 of the 175 seats it had held before parliament was dissolved. The battering suffered by the Democrats, who also preached reform, has dampened hopes in some quarters that a true two-party system was taking root in Asia’s oldest democracy.
“Recovering from such a setback is going to be a Herculean task for the Democratic Party and it requires a Machiavellian will that so far it has failed to show,” said Jesper Koll, chief economist at Merrill Lynch in Tokyo. Others said, though, that the two-party system was alive and well and a future change in power possible – if the Democrats could regroup and adapt to the new political culture symbolised by the maverick, media-savvy Koizumi.
“Who is the alternative to the LDP? It’s the Democrats. One thing you can predict with ease is that the LDP will lose votes in the next election,” said Steven Reed, a political science professor at Chuo University. Indeed, the growing clout of a new class of “floating voters” who shun ties to any particular political party means shifts can be stunning and swift – as they were in Sunday’s poll.
Koizumi, who reiterated yesterday said that he would step down when his term as LDP chief ends next September, has refined to an art a campaign style focused on policy debates and party leaders’ images in place of the drabber past battles, when candidates appealed to vested interest groups with handouts and favours.
<B>Linda SIEG</B>
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