In the aftermath of six successive defeats in regional elections, the dominant force in Japanese politics the Liberal Democratic Party is staring down electoral defeat in the national elections scheduled for August 30.
The nature of the electoral tsunami that confronts the LDP indicates that more is at stake than just the decline of a political party. Japanese politics itself is being reinvented, and the destruction of the LDP is an important component of that ground-shaking transformation.
In sifting through the rubble of the LDP's disastrous campaign in the Tokyo Metropolitan election on July 12, it is easy to see why the LDP frontline has panicked. In every demographic, the LDP was trounced by the opposition Democratic Party of Japan. In the over-60s category, which has been deeply dismayed by the mismanagement of millions of pension fund records by the Government and by LDP-designed cutbacks on aged care services, the LDP vote imploded from a 43 per cent support rate in the previous election, to a miserable 27 per cent support rate on July 12. The DPJ on the other hand, rose from an 11 per cent support rate to a 42 per cent rate last weekend. In this rapidly ageing society, the grey vote matters.
The news gets bleaker when we examine the behaviour of the voting public in general. Voter turn-outs reached historic highs in the recent regional campaigns, indicating the determination of voters to make a statement in advance of the national poll. Moreover, voters of all hues have turned their backs on the dominant party in power. Not only did the overwhelming majority of unaffiliated voters rush to support the DPJ, but even the LDP's own declared affiliated supporters betrayed them. A full 20 per cent of the LDP's faithful ticked the box for the DPJ on July 12. This is not an electorate that is thinking only of the pending summer holidays. Instead, they have revolutionary political change on their minds.
As the extent of the humiliation confronting the LDP became obvious on election night, several party heavyweights began muttering about Prime Minister Taro Aso's responsibility for the disaster. Although Aso's prime ministership has been marred by gaffes and indecisiveness, and his personal support rate has sunk to lows that usually foreshadow political death, blaming Aso simply does not wash.
Aso was quarantined by his own party from the Tokyo campaign. Amongst party leaders, his was the only face missing from election campaign posters around the capital. Aso's departure for the G8 summit in L'Acquila during the campaign was greeted by LDP leaders and candidates with relief, as he could not spoil their appeal to their support base. Aso cannot be blamed as the principal architect of this rout.
Instead of mobilising the Prime Minister, LDP officials paraded the front line of cabinet ministers and party executives to the electorate. One dominant pattern that emerged in voter decision-making was that voters shunned not only LDP candidates, but especially those who had been repeatedly returned over many elections. It was precisely the LDP old guard that the voters turned on, preferring instead raw, young and politically inexperienced candidates fielded by the DPJ.
It is still possible that elements of the LDP will underpin pending electoral suicide by removing Aso before the August election, but they should not deceive themselves that this will somehow alter the view of the electorate. This electorate is rejecting the LDP way of politics, not merely the person who happens to be leading the party at this moment.
Exit polls on July 12 reveal some of the reasons why negative energy is flowing from voters to the LDP. In the week before the election, Aso was repeatedly humiliated by his own party in the media. Aso would announce his intention to shuffle the party executive, and then a stream of factional and party office holders would parade across TV screens stating that they disagreed with this plan. Aso was forced to pretend he had never intended anything like a major reshuffle. When Aso started discussing the date of the pending national election, party heavies weighed in on the evening news, openly contesting Aso's statements. Given that in Japan it is the prime minister who makes the call on when an election is held, the public could only see this as cannibalisation of the leader by his own party. The electorate noted Aso's weakness, but blamed the party elders for behaving badly. As astonishing as it may seem, the party that has ruled Japanese politics since 1955 seems to have lost its electoral compass, and is hurtling full tilt towards the cliff of electoral defeat. In the midst of a serious economic and financial crisis, a collapse in the terms of trade and rising unemployment, the LDP collective leadership seems more concerned with its own survival or more precisely, with each politician's personal survival than with the fate of the country.
It was the former LDP hero of electoral success and prime minister between 2001-06, the maverick Koizumi Junichiro, who declared his intention to ''destroy the LDP''. What Koizumi meant by this was a two-pronged assault on the LDP: on its factions, and on the locus of policy-making in the party. Koizumi managed to clip the wings of faction leaders by depriving them of their power base, utilising political funds laws, electoral reforms and altering the voting system for the LDP presidency to achieve one of his goals. The second goal, of wrenching policy-making power from the inner sanctum of party committees, was partly achieved by concentrating resources into the Prime Minister's own office. Aided by the international emergency heralded by the 9/11 attacks and by increasingly belligerent behaviour by North Korea, Koizumi was able to make notable strides in the area of security policy. Japan has contributed to the coalitions in Iraq and Afghanistan, albeit with constraints, without revising the famous ''peace constitution''. Prime Minister- centred policy-making was central to these developments.
As Koizumi heads into retirement at the forthcoming election, it is perhaps fitting that his ''revolution'' is more likely to be achieved by the opposition Democratic Party than by his own LDP. The irony is that Koizumi's huge victory margin in the last election is the only thing preventing the DPJ from doing so without the burden of having to compromise with a coalition partner in government.
LDP politics is now playing out its end game, and the new politics of Japan are being forged in the cauldron of political desperation and spite that will taint, but not derail, the emergence of policy-driven politics in Japan.
Rikki Kersten is Professor of Japanese Political History at the Australian National University, and Co-Principal Researcher in the Australia-Japan Foundation funded project on the Australia-Japan Security Relationship. She is currently based at Tokyo University as a Research Fellow.
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