A year after sweeping to power in a landslide win Japan’s center-left governing party is unpopular, divided and hobbled by policy gridlock as it grapples with pressing economic problems.
After a sobering first 12 months since its Aug. 30 victory, and already led by their second prime minister, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) faces the prospect of yet another power change.
A party that promised weary voters people power after more than five decades of almost unbroken conservative rule is now seen offering business as usual instead as factional infighting consumes the energies of the political class.
It has not been an auspicious period for a party that promised to revolutionize Japanese politics, most political observers agree.
“What on earth are these people doing? Many voters must feel disgusted,” an editorial in the Asahi Shimbun said last week, criticizing the ruling party’s “highly inward-looking power struggle.”
Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan, 63, just three months into office, faces a leadership challenge from a scandal-tainted power broker, 68-year-old Ichiro Ozawa, at party leadership elections in the middle of next month.
If Kan loses, Ozawa would become Japan’s sixth prime minister in four years, exacerbating the nation’s decades-old leadership merry-go-round that has helped erode the country’s stature on the international stage.
The internal squabbling comes at a time when Japan can ill afford it. Economic growth slowed sharply to an annualized 0.4 percent in the second quarter, signalling that, as long expected, rising giant China has overtaken graying Japan as the world’s No. 2 economy.
With tepid domestic demand, deflation, a shrinking population and a mountain of public debt, Japan has a long list of problems to tackle, worsened now by a quickly rising yen that has made its exports less competitive.
The DPJ has already abandoned many of the big-spending promises that brought the party to office under Yukio Hatoyama — ranging from child allowance to toll-free highways — and instead stressed fiscal austerity.
But his straight talk on the need for higher taxes quickly backfired and led to heavy losses in upper house elections last month that left the DPJ without a majority in that chamber, making it more difficult to pass laws.
“The DPJ dashed voter expectations by failing to keep its idealistic pledges,” said Shujiro Kato, a political science professor at Toyo University. “With a hung parliament, you have to seek ways to cooperate with the opposition, otherwise you can’t pass bills. This is a novel challenge for Japanese politics, which has long had no serious change of governments.”
Most observers agree the rookie government has managed to squander much of the goodwill it had when it won office as Japan’s usually risk-averse voters ousted the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party last year.
On the foreign policy front, too, Tokyo still has some way to go to fully mend ties with the US over a dispute that sealed Hatoyama’s fate after less than nine months in office. Hatoyama vowed to move an unpopular US airbase off Okinawa, then changed his mind — managing to alienate both Okinawans and the US in the process.
Some analysts say Japan’s government is still getting used to wielding power in what is now a real two-party system, and to having to adapt promises it made in opposition to the more complex realities of governing.
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