Japanese voters longing for change look likely to hand the opposition Democratic Party a historic victory in an election one week away, trouncing the conservative party that has ruled for most of the past half-century.
That would be a stunning reversal of fortunes for the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) from four years ago, when charismatic former Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi led the way to a huge win with pledges of bold reforms.
What has altered, analysts say, isn’t voters’ desire for change, but their perception of who can achieve it.
“In 2005, it looked like Koizumi would deliver change,” Chuo University professor Steven Reed said. “Now voters are going to try for change again — but this time, with different people.”
Newspaper surveys are predicting Yukio Hatoyama’s decade-old Democratic Party could win by a landslide, taking some 300 seats in parliament’s 480-member lower house and ousting the LDP for only the second time since its 1955 founding.
Analysts caution that the Democrats’ victory may be less overwhelming, but many do expect them to win a majority.
That would be a huge shift from 2005, when the LDP won a whopping 296 seats and together with its smaller partner, the New Komeito, gained a two-thirds majority in the chamber.
Certainly, the content of calls for change is different now.
Koizumi energized the electorate with a pledge to privatize the giant postal system as a symbol of bold, market-friendly reforms and by kicking out party rebels who opposed the plan.
Four years, one global financial crisis and a recession later, the Democrats are promising to refocus spending on consumers not companies to boost growth, reduce bureaucrats’ clout over policies, cut waste and rein in what they see as the excesses of US-style capitalism.
“We must shift to a policy of directly stimulating household finances and by that means make people’s livelihoods and the economy prosperous,” Hatoyama said in a TV debate yesterday.
The Democrats also want to forge a diplomatic stance more independent of Tokyo’s top security ally Washington.
Some analysts say for many voters, content matters less than the concept of change given anxiety about a quickly aging society and challenges such as from rival China.
“Voters want the country to get better. It’s nothing specific. It’s a feeling,” Reed said. “Voters as a mass are not capable of dealing with a lot of policy details. They just want to be confident that these guys know what they are doing.”
Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso has admitted Koizumi’s reforms had a downside, but was trying to convince voters that only an experienced LDP could handle tough problems such as an economy struggling to emerge from its worst recession in 60 years and security threats from an unpredictable nearby North Korea.
The past three years since Koizumi stepped down, however, may have seriously undermined that claim.
Koizumi’s successor, former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, shifted focus from economic reforms to a nationalist agenda aimed at making Japan proud of its past and loosening the constraints of its pacifist Constitution.
He then quit abruptly just months after the ruling bloc lost a 2007 upper house poll because of public anger over scandals in his Cabinet and bureaucrats’ loss of millions of pension records.
The next Japanese prime minister, Yasuo Fukuda, lasted only about a year in the face of a parliamentary deadlock and incumbent Aso’s popularity has been eroded by gaffes and policy flip-flops.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS