As expected, despite their tenuous position in the party (and their bleak electoral prospects), the LDP has not seen young reformists rush to exit the party and sign on with Watanabe Yoshimi's Your Party.Only a small number has left, one by one, and with only a week until the campaign officially begins, presumably not many …
Tag: Koizumi children
Fleeing a sinking ship?
A week after Nagasaki Kotaro — and his 3600 supporters in Yamanashi's second district — left the LDP, another Koizumi child has bolted the party.Yamauchi Koichi, a first termer representing Kanagawa's ninth district, had, as discussed in this post, come to recognize the unpleasant situation for reformists in the post-Koizumi LDP. As he said in …
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 fall
The Aso cabinet is in free fall.The Yomiuri Shimbun has released its December public opinion poll, which found that not only has the Aso cabinet's approval rating fallen by half since the beginning of November (from 40.5% to 20.9%), but the cabinet's disapproval rating rose by twenty-five points to 66.7% during the same span of …
Conservatives, Clientelists, and Koizumians
Asahi has published a long article illustrating the feeling of crisis that has descended upon the LDP, especially following Aso Taro's disastrous showing in the latest Nikkei poll (discussed here).After months of building, it appears that the dissolution of the LDP may finally be in motion.The LDP can be roughly divided into three broad groupings, …
Continue reading Conservatives, Clientelists, and Koizumians
The end is nigh
I have previously speculated on the consequences of Aso Taro's becoming prime minister for the future of the LDP.In this post, for example, I wrote, "...If the conservatives retake control of the LDP under Mr. Aso and reunite with Mr. Hiranuma, that alliance could prove fatal for the LDP, as the readmission of Mr. Hiranuma …
Koizumi speaks
Just one day after telling an audience of young reformers that he would not say who he was supporting, it appears that Koizumi Junichiro has come out in support of Koike Yuriko, the woman who he elevated to his cabinet shortly after her arrival in the LDP.Sankei reports that Mr. Koizumi met Friday with Koike …
Administrative reform is a wedge issue after all
In this post earlier this month, I asked whether administrative reform, the subject of a private consultative commission at the Kantei, was the ideal wedge issue for the DPJ to wield against the LDP.At the time, the DPJ had yet to elevate the issue to the top of its talking points. It appears, however, that …
Continue reading Administrative reform is a wedge issue after all
The Machimura faction grows
Seki Yoshihiro, an LDP member of the House of Representatives representing Hyogo-3, has announced that he is joining the Machimura faction, making him the eighty-fifth member of the party's largest faction.Mr. Seki, a "Koizumi kid" as indicated by his membership in the "Group of 83" (AKA, the Koizumi Kids Klub), is neither the first member …
Who won the battle over postal reform?
On Saturday, Koga Makoto, the LDP's chief election strategist, announced that the party's candidate in Gifu-1 will be Noda Seiko, a former postal minister ousted from the party as a postal rebel in the summer of 2005 and readmitted to the party in December 2006. The dispute was over whether the party would give the …
Tobias S. Harris 