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, …
Tag: Tanigaki Sadakazu
The LDP has an election date
Aso Taro has resigned his post as party president and the LDP has scheduled its party leadership for four weeks from today, 28 September. The campaign for the party presidency will officially begin ten days earlier, on 18 September, giving the candidates just over two weeks to make their intentions known and then begin traveling …
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 LDP and DPJ talk past each other
A six-party conference of government and opposition parties met Friday to negotiate a compromise on the future of the special fund for road construction. Debate will begin in earnest on Wednesday, a week before the governing coalition is expected to use its HR supermajority to reimpose the temporary gasoline tax.According to Mainichi, at the initial …
"Not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be"
With the imminent rebirth of the former Kochikai, the LDP faction that until the 2001 Kato uprising was the home of the mainstream tradition in the LDP embodied in Prime Ministers Ikeda, Ohira, and Miyazawa, Tanigaki Sadakazu, LDP PARC chairman and former finance minister, has been making talking about the role the resurrected faction will …
Perilous weeks ahead
Prime Minister Fukuda, as I expected when he was chosen as prime minister in late September, has shown himself to be far more adept than most commentators expected. (And one hears fewer complaints about Mr. Fukuda's being a government of factions — I have no doubt that this is Mr. Fukuda's government.)But while he has …
The coming factional realignment?
The constant churning within the LDP discussed in this post appears to be proceeding apace, with the Koga and Tanigaki factions — the splinters of the former Kochikai, which broke following the aborted Kato rebellion in 2000 — in discussions to reunite by the spring, in time for the next election.The Kochikai began life as …
