Japan’s largest opposition party is looking both at veteran leaders and fresh young faces to help it recover after it lost to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in a record drubbing.
The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) is set to elect a new leader on Saturday after Katsuya Okada, a dour former civil servant, quit over the election rout in which the party lost one third of its seats.
Several news reports said the younger DPJ members are rallying behind Seiji Maehara, a 43-year-old who was the opposition’s shadow defence chief and spokesperson on national security in the last Parliament.
Nicknamed the ”security geek” by his colleagues, Maehara is considered an expert on missiles and North Korea and has criticiced Koizumi for letting relations with China worsen.
Koizumi largely ignored foreign policy in the election, focusing the campaign squarely on his proposal to privatise the post office which he cast as a litmus test for reform.
Maehara said on Thursday that the DPJ had let Koizumi, who now enjoys a powerful two-thirds majority, portray the opposition as obstructionist.
”I think the chief reason the party lost the election is its failure to propose alternatives on postal privatisation during the Parliament session,” Maehara said in announcing his candidacy.
”If I become leader I will always come up with an alternative plan on important political issues,” he said.
Maehara, writing earlier this year in the liberal Asahi Shimbun newspaper, called on Japan to consider building an alternative to the Yasukuni war shrine, which Koizumi visits annually, provoking anger in neighbouring countries.
The DPJ was formed in 1998 as a motley collection of former conservatives from Koizumi’s Liberal Democratic Party and ex-Socialists. Both camps could seek dominance if it looks to return to one of its former leaders.
A socialist-oriented group is urging the DPJ to pick its charismatic former leader Naoto Kan (58) who became famous as health minister in 1996 for exposing a scandal of HIV-contaminated blood.
Kan stepped down last year after admitting he failed to pay compulsory state pension premiums despite criticising others for not doing the same.
Some DPJ lawmakers are also reportedly looking at Ichiro Ozawa (63) a veteran conservative powerbroker, who had not taken the DPJ leadership last year because he, too, failed to make the pension payments.
Another name mentioned among younger candidates is 48-year-old Yoshihiko Noda, who was the finance minister in the shadow Cabinet.
Okada, who quit early on Monday morning after the results came in, had earlier been seen as a shining hope for the DPJ after he helped it gain ground in upper-house elections last year.
Nicknamed ”Prince No Smile” for his seriousness, Okada’s DPJ came up with wide-ranging proposals for economic reforms going beyond the ruling party’s ideas, but it was no match for the flamboyant Koizumi.
Jun Iio, professor of politics at National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, noted that the DPJ also won its highest ever showing in terms of the number of votes cast for it.
He said the DPJ needed the kind of focused message that Koizumi had. He managed to portray his Liberal Democratic Party as reformist despite being in power for nearly all the past half-century.
”I think it would be difficult to push forward an image of the DPJ as reborn if they choose the old guard such as Mr Kan or Mr Ozawa,” Iio said. – AFP
