Although the government parties rallied from behind as the night went on, the LDP and Komeitō failed to recapture a majority of the seats in the Tokyo metropolitan assembly, the goal set by the LDP.NHK has called all but three seats, with the opposition parties currently holding sixty-five, one more than the sixty-four needed for …
Tag: DPJ
The LDP has exhausted its credit with the Japanese people
Asō Tarō and the LDP failed in the first of two electoral challenges that will precede the dissolution of the House of Representatives and the forthcoming general election.Kawakatsu Heita, the DPJ-backed candidate in the Shizuoka gubernatorial election, defeated Sakamoto Yukiko, the LDP- and Komeitō-backed candidate, on Sunday, this despite a split in the DPJ vote …
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The Tokyo election truce
The campaign for the 12 July Tokyo assembly election officially began Friday, marking the beginning of what could be the Asō government's last stand.The prime minister and his supporters are, of course, doing everything they can to dismiss the notion that Asō Tarō's fate somehow rests upon the party's performance in the Tokyo election, even …
Can the DPJ bring democracy to Japan?
My latest contribution to the Far Eastern Economic Review, co-authored with Colum Murphy, considers the possibilities of a DPJ government.It is available online here, and will be the cover article in FEER's July/August issue.
Is it possible improve Japanese political financing?
Less than two months after succeeding the tainted Ozawa Ichirō as DPJ president, Hatoyama Yukio is mired in a scandal of his own, related to the use of fake contributions to cover for illegal transfers from Hatoyama's personal funds to his political support group.Jun Okumura describes the scandal in painstaking detail here.Asō Tarō naturally singled …
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Asō makes a pun
Speaking before the Upper House Budget Committee on Monday, Prime Minister Asō Tarō reached a new low for an LDP leader attacking the opposition DPJ.Asō was addressing the debate regarding the DPJ's plans to finance new spending by cutting wasteful spending and tapping the so-called "buried treasure" of Kasumigaseki, surpluses in the government's numerous special …
The vision thing
On Tuesday the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy (CEFP) released the 2009 Basic Plan for Economic and Fiscal Reform (known colloquially as the honebuto), available here along with other documents from the Tuesday meeting.The plan is controversial because the Asō government appears to have sidestepped an existing agreement — originating in the 2006 honebuto …
The DPJ faces the bureaucracy
With the DPJ's prospects on the rise and the LDP mired in what may be terminal disarray, the DPJ is receiving greater scrutiny when it comes to how the party will govern should it take power.That, after all, is what this election is about: if seiken kotai [regime change], the DPJ's longtime mantra is to …
Pushback on preemption
Prime Minister Asō Tarō and a group of national security hawks in the LDP may be pushing hard for the inclusion of preemptive capabilities in this year's National Defense Program Guidelines (NDPG), but it appears that while there is little opposition from within the LDP, the Aso government may yet have some difficulty getting its …
The battle for "reform"
In remarkably little time, the LDP has swung from doomed to ebullient and now once again is showing its age and fragility. And all it took was a nominal change in leadership in the DPJ.Suga Yoshihide and Nakagawa Hidenao's campaign to ban hereditary politics from the LDP has proved to be immensely detrimental for Aso …
Tobias S. Harris 