A bad night for the DPJ

Asian politics

Banyan's notebook

Japan's upper-house election results

A bad night for the DPJ

by H.T. | TOKYO

NAOTO KAN, Japan’s prime minister, who tried to convince voters that the country’s debt-ridden economy looked dangerously like Greece’s, now faces the fight of his life to stay in office after his party’s disastrous performance in upper-house elections on July 11th. Less than six weeks after Mr Kan took office, the odds of yet another leadership crisis have just shortened dramatically. Mr Kan is the sixth prime minister in four years, and more political paralysis beckons. The only consolation is that in voting for other parties, Japanese appear to have sent a fairly strong signal in favour of sound economic management and faster growth.

In this election for half the seats in the upper house of the Diet (parliament), the raw numbers tell what a hash the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has made of governing Japan since it ousted the long-ruling Liberal Democrats (LDP) ten months ago. The DPJ won just 44 seats, ten less than it had hoped for and well short of a majority, even in league with its small coalition partner. In the lower house, the DPJ lacks the magic two-thirds majority that would have allowed it to bypass the upper house. So it will be extraordinarily hard for the DPJ to cobble together enough support to pass legislation.

So further coalition politics beckons. But the task of reaching out to other political parties is further complicated because one of the parties that has benefited most at the DPJ’s expense is its old nemesis, the LDP. This is perhaps the biggest surprise of Sunday’s result: last September, when the DPJ drove it from power, the LDP was in tatters. On Sunday it actually won more seats than the DPJ, 51, largely thanks to its strong performance in single-seat prefectural districts, where it won 21 seats, compared with the DPJ’s eight.

The LDP’s strong showing is owed partly to its old political machine, which has not seized up entirely, but even more so to disenchantment with the DPJ. Another factor may have helped on the margin: Shinjiro Koizumi, telegenic son of a telegenic former prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, campaigned tirelessly for the party’s individual candidates, though he was not running for election himself. When your correspondent stumbled across him on the campaign trail, voters behaved as if they were in the presence of a pop star. In a country whose politicians lack star appeal, such magnetism matters.

Another youthful force which did well in the elections was Your Party, formed less than a year ago by disgruntled LDP and DPJ types. It picked up ten seats to add to the one upper-house seat it already held. Seven of the new seats came through the proportional-representation voting system in which each voter may cast an extra ballot for his favourite party. So Your Party has emerged as a new force in Japanese politics. In the words of its president, Yoshimi Watanabe, the party hopes to become the “gatekeeper” in the new Diet, but is firmly opposed to entering into a coalition with the DPJ. It is a party that makes rescuing the economy Japan’s top priority. Interestingly, Mr Watanabe said on election night that one of its first goals would be to reform the Bank of Japan and end deflation. No details, but for those who think the central bank bears much of the responsibility for Japan’s economic ills, it would be a good start.

For the economy more broadly, the election is maddeningly hard to read. Both the DPJ and the LDP supported a rise in the consumption tax, but the LDP appeared not to be punished for it. Your Party opposes a rise in the tax, but that did not seem to hurt it. The populist People’s New Party, which had tried desperately to reverse the privatisation of the postal system as a coalition partner of the DPJ, won no seats. Some women candidates close to Junichiro Koizumi, a reformist vilified by all parties in last summer’s general election (and father to Shinjiro), all won.

Probably the most important message is that voters want leaders who know what they are doing. Sadly, such leaders seem to be in short supply. Mr Kan appears to have been as muddled over his pledge to discuss a rise in the consumption tax as was his predecessor, Yukio Hatoyama, over moving the Futenma airbase in Okinawa—which helped force his resignation last month. Mr Kan’s popularity early on was boosted when he sought to distance himself from Ichiro Ozawa, the éminence grise in the DPJ. But then he let Mr Ozawa snipe at him from the campaign sidelines.

So Mr Kan may now face a bitter DPJ leadership contest in September. However much he likes to cast himself as a man of the people, the new prime minister may be thinking of his own survival in the next few months as much as the country’s future. For how much longer can this directionless country afford such distractions?