Thursday 27 August 2009

Surviving Political Earthquakes: The Future of the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party

With our eyes drawn to the recent political volcanoes across the Atlantic, the prospect that on Sunday the tectonic plates of politics in Asia-Pacific will shift radically is largely yet to receive much attention in our media. There is a real prospect for the first time in fifty years that in Japan the largely conservative ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) will lose power in an election to the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), a broad-based grouping of liberal and social democratic interests.1

Some would argue that the result on Sunday is far from certain. They may point to those factors which remain in the LDP government’s favour, amongst other things: the large electoral mountain for the DPJ; the likely need to form a coalition government (the LDP’s own coalition with New Komeito being relatively stable); the economy recently coming out of recession; the LDP retaining a strong party organizational capacity, bolstered by its long-established patron-client networks; and restrictive electoral laws, preventing the growth of grassroots movements, such as that which enabled Barack Obama’s victory, by limiting the use of the internet for campaigning. The LDP campaign has also focused on attacking the DPJ’s ability to deliver its elaborate spending promises without raising consumption tax. Many Social Democrat parties in the past have fallen foul of incumbent government charges of economic incompetence, not least Neil Kinnock’s Labour in 1992.

However, the saliency of these factors is debatable. Climbing the mountain is made easier by the LDP’s long tenure of office and a general desire for change, whilst the DPJ have also gained useful experience of working in coalition with left-wing parties in the upper House of Councillors for the past two years.2 Economic recovery is blighted by the LDP’s own record of economic mismanagement and recent spate of scandals which has led to the loss of several cabinet members, including the finance minister in early 2009 whilst the DPJ has sought to nullify charges of economic incompetence through the presentation of its detailed spending plans (for an alternative view see 3). In aiming to counter long-established networks and restrictive campaign laws, the DPJ has designed its manifesto to appeal to a wide constituency, ranging from such measures as providing an allowance to children of 312,000 Yen (about 2000 pounds) per annum, to reducing the lower rate of corporation tax from 18% to 11%, and has even adopted relatively centrist Foreign policy not that dissimilar to the incumbent government, but nevertheless still able to express their desires for a more Asia-centric focus and goals such as global nuclear disarmament.4  

Regardless of the electoral outcome, there seems little doubt that the LDP will have to work hard to recover from the crises that have battered it in recent years. Whether in government or opposition, I would suggest that there are three key foundations which the LDP could build upon in order to recover its strength and ability to govern: Trust grounded in Grassroots Organization; Strength grounded in Unifying Leadership; and Vision grounded in Concrete Policy.

Trust through Grassroots Organization
For the LDP to truly regain public trust, it should not only talk about or implement changes to the law over such issues as political donations and the ‘hereditary transfer’ of parliamentary seats. As a party which has stressed the organic nature of society and the need to promote values such as responsibility, the LDP must seize upon changing the very culture, root and branch, within itself, striving to reflect the more meritocratic principles of the society it has helped to fashion.

One possible way of doing this, and of reconnecting with the people, would be to use the LDP’s sizeable organizational capacity to establish a more open and democratic federalized structure, seeking the involvement of a far greater number of people at a local level. Mass party politics may be largely dead, but the involvement of the masses in politics is alive and growing as we have seen in recent movements from America and beyond. It would perhaps be best for the LDP to revisit its experiment of balloting party members in 1978, using such innovations as electronic or online balloting to overcome difficulties whether time-related or technical. 

A greater commitment to the decentralization of power in the country, before the LDP’s stated goal of 2017, is the twin goal of this reformed and federalized party structure, promoting peoples’ ability to shape policies that impact upon them at a local level, and also giving the grassroots of a federalized LDP the tools to gain added administrative experience at a sub-national level, boosting their capacity for governance in the future. 

Strength grounded in Unifying Leadership
To some extent the present leader, Taro Aso, has not helped the situation with his political gaffes and unpopular image created by such activities as dining out very frequently at expensive restaurants. However, blaming any loss solely on his leadership would make the same mistake that other conservative parties have made in the past, such as the UK Conservatives in 1997 who seemed to focus their blame on John Major at the expense of more reflection on the multiplicity of factors involved in their defeat. The LDP have to recognize that his weakness is reflective of a fundamental and contradictive dichotomy within the party as a whole: the post-Koizumi desire for a leader with widespread name recognition and popularity; versus the considerable power of long-established factional bases, which has led to the quick removal of leaders when they are seen to no longer be popular, thus limiting their ability to lead and creating an image of inconsistency at odds with LDP’s own principles of stability. 

To some extent, the reorganization of the LDP structure, with a leader enjoying the elected mandate of the grassroots would help to alleviate this problem. It must also be accompanied however with greater institutional resources for the leadership, particularly in terms of manpower and expertise to: manage and interact with the components of a complex party machine; deal with the demands of the mediatised age of 24 hour news; and develop well-thought out policies. At the same time, the particularly entrenched and smoke-filled back room world of intra-party politics serves to sometimes choke the respectable efforts of LDP leaders. Just as with the grassroots, a more formally organised and wider participation of different groups within the party, both in its internal governing structure and that of the country, would help to achieve a greater sense of unity and transparency, providing those within the party with greater avenues of opportunity for advancement of interests through institutional channels.5 

Vision grounded in Concrete Policy
It has been suggested by some that the LDP has run out of ideas, or is merely grasping at straws. Rather, I would suggest that the LDP has many ideas, some of them with potential, such as ring-fencing increased consumption tax to pay social security costs, but that it needs to refocus its priorities and concentrate on policies that make its vision of responsibility and economic growth a reality in the present. Much of the manifesto appears to concentrate on the long-term issues.6

This is perhaps reflective of the LDP’s own longevity in political office and is not in itself wrong. Rather, the LDP should also focus more on providing concrete details of how it would address the country’s immediate concerns, such as bringing forward its planned additional vocational training schemes from starting in 2013 to the present. It may also reinforce its credibility by tying more specific promises to how they will be paid for, perhaps emulating the UK Liberal Democrats past plan to put 1p on income tax to pay for increased investment in education, or the Norwegian Government’s pension fund, fed by oil taxation and grown through strategic investment.7
 

Conclusion
It may well be that even a period of DPJ government would be short-lived. It is more often than not governments who lose elections. Nevertheless, as we have witnessed relatively recently in Britain, an opposition can easily lose in the face of an unpopular government, if it does not provide the people with a credible alternative. Whoever leads the LDP after Taro Aso, there will almost certainly have to be changes to reverse their decline in government both on a national and sub-national level which in 2007 saw the loss of their majority in the upper house for the first time ever and recently also saw a historic victory for the DPJ in elections in Tokyo.8

It is probable that longstanding interests within the LDP will be resistant to any far reaching change, unless the defeat was to be especially heavy on Sunday. The death knell of political entities is sounded too often by the media, but it is always worth remembering the Canadian Conservative party which went into the 1993 election a longstanding party of government, divided, in a time of economic difficulty, with what has been regarded as a weak leadership, and was reduced from 169 to merely 2 seats.9 It is also worthwhile to remember that they returned to government (albeit a minority one) 13 years later. It may well be that opposition can bring new life to the Japanese Liberal Democrats, and a new political future to Japan and the world.

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