Aso braced; Fukuda into the sunset

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Sep 4th 2008 | TOKYO
From The Economist print edition

For the country, the start of an awfully big adventure

Illustration by Peter Schrank
AS YASUO FUKUDA walked from the stage this week, his colleagues angrily recalled why they had propelled him into the country’s top job in the first place. It was to avoid a repeat of their humiliation last autumn at the hands of his younger predecessor, Shinzo Abe, who had shuffled his cabinet in the face of low popularity ratings, opened a special session of the Diet (parliament), and then abruptly resigned after a year in office. In an echo of that disaster, Mr Fukuda, with abysmal ratings of his own, also shuffled his cabinet, in early August. He had laid out his legislative agenda for an autumn special session. And then, on September 1st, he announced his resignation. If, as expected, he steps down on September 24th, he will have served almost exactly as long as Mr Abe.

For a man who agonised over choices, it was the most abrupt decision of the 72-year-old’s political career (he did not even tell his wife). Mr Fukuda said he did not want to create a “political vacuum”, and at least he moved before the special session had begun. Still, his shocked colleagues are bitter. The public’s disdain for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is presumably now deeper. Meanwhile, the opposition camp is electrified, sensing a chance to end the half-century-long LDP shogunate.

History may be kinder than his colleagues are to Mr Fukuda, who had a nearly impossible job as prime minister in a hung parliament—the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has controlled the upper house since July 2007. Even more thankless, he led a party whose disagreements had broken out into the open after a charismatic reformer, Junichiro Koizumi, was succeeded by the disastrous Mr Abe.

In his pronouncements, Mr Fukuda showed a keen sense of how Japan needed to tackle the burdens of an ageing population and mountainous national debt. He challenged his party’s own pork-barrel interests, particularly the road-construction lobby, which not even Mr Koizumi defeated. In foreign matters he kept relations with America from fraying, by using the ruling coalition’s supermajority to ram through legislation allowing Japan’s navy to refuel ships in the Indian Ocean in support of efforts in Afghanistan. And he deepened Mr Abe’s initiatives to warm Japan’s ties with neighbouring China and South Korea. But there was no denying it: Mr Fukuda’s leadership lacked even a smidgen of colour; the one thing he was not, as he admitted this week, was popular.

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Had the cabinet shuffle offered a lasting bounce in the polls, Mr Fukuda might have struggled on for longer. Yet Koizumi-style reformists such as Hidenao Nakagawa were excluded from the new cabinet. Meanwhile Kaoru Yosano, the new economy minister, who has a clear sense of what needs to be done to overhaul the country’s finances, was ordered to cobble together a fiscal-stimulus package in response to panicky and somewhat overblown fears that the economy, after six years of growth, was heading for a deep recession again (see article).

Much of the pressure for the stimulus came from the LDP’s coalition partner, New Komeito, a Buddhist-linked party. It has had little influence in government affairs, but with the LDP in disarray it is making its presence felt. Many New Komeito members are pacifists, and it pressed the government to shorten the coming Diet session, meaning it would not have time to use its supermajority to renew the Indian Ocean mission. More than anything, this may have tipped Mr Fukuda into resigning.

The man who negotiated with New Komeito over the truncation of the Diet session and, unwittingly or not, thus helped undermine Mr Fukuda, was Taro Aso, the LDP’s secretary-general. After a strong showing behind Mr Fukuda in the last leadership election, he is now the clear favourite to take over as party president and prime minister after the LDP votes on September 22nd. Mr Aso, a 67-year-old Catholic, is from a prosperous right-wing family. He was foreign minister under both Mr Koizumi and Mr Abe. A hawk who wants Japan to play a much more robust role abroad, Mr Aso is also an original compared with more ideological conservatives. For instance, he advocates taking the sting out of the militarist Yasukuni shrine, which bedevils Japan’s relations with its neighbours, by moving worship of Japan’s war dead to somewhere less contentious.

Asonomics
On domestic matters, he favours a stimulus package, but opposes a return to the LDP’s big-spending ways. Other than that, he seems rather unsure of his own core economic convictions. That is a potential weakness. Another is a reckless tendency for loose talk. For now, that may matter less than that Mr Aso is congenial, popular with the LDP’s grassroots and the public. An unabashed fan of manga comics, the shares of whose publishers soared this week, he loves to press the flesh. Above all, he lacks the morose frown and sagging chops of both Mr Fukuda and Mr Abe.

Mr Aso will face a challenge from Yuriko Koike, a former defence minister, who will try to rally disaffected Koizumi followers behind her. But winning the party’s nomination will be the easy part. Yukio Hatoyama, the DPJ’s secretary-general, promises “all-out war”, expecting to bring down the government by year-end. He says the DPJ will oppose the stimulus package, which he describes as “half-baked”, favouring the LDP’s traditional interests over the elderly and the weak. By opposing the Indian Ocean operation, Mr Hatoyama says the DPJ can help split the ruling coalition. He mentions coyly that New Komeito has recently been eager to talk to the DPJ.

The new prime minister need not call a general election until next September, and some LDP elders will advise Mr Aso to hang on for as long as possible. But New Komeito favours an early general election, while the LDP’s prospects might never look better than with an immediate Aso bounce in the polls. Nobuteru Ishihara, an ambitious youngster who is considering a quixotic tilt at the LDP presidency, thinks that Mr Aso will introduce a fresh cabinet to the country and call a snap election.

With an election, the uncertainties only multiply. The ruling coalition has no chance of keeping its supermajority, but might with luck win a simple majority, or plurality. But the headache of a hung Diet would remain. Victory also brings problems for the DPJ, since it counts on the support of small left-wing parties for its control of the upper house. These parties would certainly cause trouble if the DPJ decides to ditch unrealistic electoral promises in favour of sensible government. Therefore, says Isamu Ueda of New Komeito, all the scenarios point to a wholesale political realignment after the next election. Japan’s politics has just set out on its biggest adventure in over 50 years.