Get someone else

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Sep 1st 2008 | TOKYO
From Economist.com

Yasuo Fukuda quits as prime minister of Japan, as the country struggles to find stable leadership

AP
IT HAD been the wish of Japan’s 72-year-old prime minister, Yasuo Fukuda of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), to outlast his hapless predecessor, Shinzo Abe, whom he privately despised. He was supposed to provide a steady hand on the helm after Mr Abe’s poor performance. But Mr Fukuda did not manage even Mr Abe’s year in office. On Monday September 1st the prime minister announced his resignation, saying bluntly that “I thought it would be better for someone else to do the job”.

From the start, he had struggled in the face of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) which had won unprecedented control of the upper house of the Diet (parliament). Important legislation was rammed through the Diet thanks only to the two-third’s majority enjoyed by the ruling coalition in the lower house. Most notable was a bill renewing the Japanese navy’s refuelling mission in the Indian Ocean, a part of the anti-terror effort in Afghanistan and thus a gauge of Japan’s willingness to play a part in the world.

The supermajority was called for again in the spring, when a set of road-related taxes had to be renewed to avoid a hole being blown in the budget. The DPJ’s leader, Ichiro Ozawa—part-reformist, part-political bruiser who in the 1990s had stormed out the LDP and promised to bring it down—seized on the iniquity of these road taxes, whose proceeds had for decades kept a great tribe of LDP politicians and their contractor friends in clover. Mr Fukuda, to his credit, promised to overhaul the road system in the Diet session due to open later this month. It was a bold move: not even the LDP’s Junichiro Koizumi, the reformist and charismatic prime minister from 2001-06, had managed to smash the road tribe. Some younger members of the party thought that Mr Fukuda might at last be hoisting the flag of reform. In reality, the move made Mr Fukuda more enemies within his party.

His fortunes hardly improved over the summer. He got no credit from ordinary Japanese for hosting this year’s G8 summit without mishap. A cabinet reshuffle a month ago offered a small bounce in the polls. But Koizumi-style reformists such as Hidenao Nakagawa were excluded from the new line-up. Meanwhile Kaoru Yosano, the new economy minister with a clear sense of what needs to be done to overhaul the country’s finances in the face of an ageing population, was ordered to cobble together a fiscal-stimulus package in response to panicky (and probably unfounded) fears that the economy was tipping into a deep recession again.

Much of the pressure for the stimulus package came from the LDP’s junior coalition partner, New Komeito, a Buddhist-affiliated party which hitherto has played an insignificant role. It was New Komeito, many of whose members are pacifists, which also pressured the government to shorten the Diet session so that the passage of this year’s mission in the Indian Ocean was certain not to pass, since the time allotted was not enough for the government to use its supermajority. This may have tipped Mr Fukuda into resigning.

But Mr Fukuda may well have been pushed. At the time of the cabinet reshuffle, Yoshiro Mori, one of the LDP’s grand old men, foisted Taro Aso onto Mr Fukuda as the party’s new secretary-general. Mr Aso, more hawkish than Mr Fukuda, is congenial and fairly popular, having worked the party’s grass-roots organisations. He also has a reputation for straight-talking that verges on the reckless. Since his appointment as secretary-general he has appeared to do only what might undermine Mr Fukuda, who no doubt now loves Mr Abe by comparison.

Party elders including Mr Mori, who was a disastrous prime minister himself and who has now twice anointed disastrous leaders, will now probably favour an unruffled succession in favour of Mr Aso. But it is not just the DPJ’s Mr Ozawa who will be calling for a snap general election, which the LDP is not bound to call until 2009. LDP reformists may also be drawn out of the woodwork to challenge Mr Aso, including Yuriko Koike, a tough former defence minister who could probably count on the Koizumi reformists for support even though she is disdained by the party elders. The man most able to shape the moment, should he choose, is that éminence grise, Mr Koizumi himself. In the coming year Japan’s politics is primed for its biggest shake-up in more than half a century.