Japan’s new center-left Prime Minister Naoto Kan easily survived a no-confidence motion yesterday after bitter exchanges in parliament kicked off campaigning for an upper house election next month.
The conservative opposition Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) submitted the motion after the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) changed leaders last week, arguing the new prime minister had no popular mandate.
“Prime Minister Kan, you are the Great Satan who brings maximum unhappiness to Japan,” thundered LDP lawmaker Hideaki Omura in one of the more spirited outbursts, drawing both cheers and howls of disapproval from the chamber.
Kan last week replaced former prime minister Yukio Hatoyama who resigned amid political funding scandals and a dispute over a US airbase after less than nine months in office.
LDP lawmaker Ryosei Akazawa charged that “the Kan administration was formed by merely swapping the heads without asking for the people’s voice. The Kan administration is obviously a government without legitimacy.”
Because Kan’s party has a commanding majority in the powerful lower house, it easily defeated the no-confidence motion which, if passed, would have forced him to step down and dissolve the house for general elections.
The motion was defeated by 315 votes against 153.
The end of the 150-day parliamentary session yesterday effectively kicked off campaigning for upper house elections on July 11.
Kan’s DPJ, riding high in opinion polls, hopes to gain a strong majority in the upper chamber in order to easily pass laws through the Diet and avoid policy gridlock as it rules Asia’s biggest economy.
The DPJ last year ousted the conservative LDP in an electoral landslide, ending their post-war grip on Japanese politics that had been interrupted only once in more than half a century.
“The challenge for our administration is to demolish the past administration, which had thrived on a structure of vested interests,” DPJ lawmaker Katsumasa Suzuki told parliament yesterday.
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