The race to succeed Aso Taro as LDP president begins today, with three candidates vying for the unenviable task of fixing a broken Liberal Democratic Party.Surprisingly the race includes none of the candidates who Aso defeated to win the job last year: Ishiba Shigeru, despite being perhaps the most enthusiastic of the potential candidates, backed …
Tag: factional politics
Tanigaki as the compromise candidate
For the second time in three months, an effort by younger LDP members to lead the party in a different direction has run out of steam not long after getting started.Ishihara Nobuteru (52), the last hope of the LDP's younger members, bowed out of the upcoming LDP presidential election on Saturday, clearing the way for …
The LDP’s first steps towards a new party
A week after the Liberal Democratic Party suffered its first ever electoral defeat, a new party is already taking shape from the ashes.The biggest change, of course, is the final demise of the factions as a force within the party. As Koike Yuriko said earlier this week upon announcing her departure from the Machimura faction, …
Who will lead the LDP?
Masuzoe Yoichi, the upper house member who I recently listed as the obvious front runner in the race to replace Aso Taro as LDP president, said Wednesday that he would not seek the position.Masuzoe cited his responsibility as a member of the ruling cabinet for the party's defeat as his reason for not seeking the …
Meet the new LDP
Having fallen 181 seats to 119 seats in the new Diet, the LDP that will face a governing DPJ will be a peculiar party.What I find most striking is that fifty-five of the LDP's winners are hereditary members, constituting 46.5% of the party's new caucus. By comparison, of the DPJ's 308 winners, only thirty-two (10.4%) …
The LDP on the brink of disaster
The general election campaign is heading into its final days. Despite another two days of campaigning, the LDP and DPJ are mostly battling for seats on the margins — the LDP to keep from falling below 100 seats, the DPJ to reach the magic number of 320, the number required for a supermajority. As the …
Reaping the whirlwind
How can the LDP govern Japan when it can barely govern itself?The war of attrition that has been waged between the Koizumian remnant in the LDP and the rest of the party since Koizumi stepped down as prime minister in 2006 has entered a particularly bloody phase as the Koizumians have decided to launch a …
The LDP fiddles while its kingdom burns
As LDP members increasingly come to terms with what looks to be certain defeat in this year's general election — described in graphic terms by MTC as the LDP's "thrashing about and coughing up blood" — the party's leaders continue to struggle in vain for some way to avoid destruction.As I mentioned in a discussion …
The elusive Nakagawa Hidenao
Will the Machimura faction live to fight the next election after all?Nakagawa Hidenao, a member of the triumvirate that leads the faction and a leading critic of Mr. Aso, was defiant in the face of criticism from Mori Yoshiro, don of the faction, seeing no reason for stepping down from the triumvirate. He denied claims …
Mori wants Nakagawa out
I have chronicled divisions in the Machimura faction since May of last year, and I have written on several occasions of what I think is the impending destruction of the LDP's biggest faction, paraphrasing Monty Python last month to conclude that the faction is in fact an ex-faction.The destruction of the Machimura faction proceeds apace.In …
Tobias S. Harris 