Some Nice Things About the Minshinto

This past weekend the Minshuto (Democratic Party of Japan) and the Ishin no To (Japan Innovation Party) merged, forming a new named party, the Minshinto (which in English could be "the Democratic Progressive Party”but in order to avoid confusion with the Taiwan ruling party of the same name is being called the "Democratic Party"). The so far mild public reaction to the event has prompted the small English language Japan commentariat to offer only a tiny burst of mostly negative reviews. Yuki Tatsumi at Stimson is the most scathing, dismissing the new party as merely the old party, with all the same negatives as before (Link1). Tobias Harris, writing for the Sasakawa Foundation, is a bit nicer but still dwells upon the lack so far of a positive public reaction to the new party’s formation. (Link2)

As hard as it may be to believe, there are some nice things one can say about the Minshinto.

1) DP leader Okada Katsuya headed off a potentially catastrophic split of his own party prior to a House of Councillors election. DP conservatives/Matsushita Seikei products (often both) like Maehara Seiji, Nagashima Akihisa and Hosono Goshi are unhappy at the Okada secretariat's steps toward electoral collaboration with the Japan Communist Party. They have been threatening to leave, joining members of the rump Ishin no To in a new conservative opposition party. With brought their JIP conservative buddies now in their party, the DP conservatives are less likely to depart. The price for this unity was accepting a stupid name change.

2) Japan's largest opposition party got larger, not smaller. That alone is something. DP has 96 seats in the House of Representatives; 60 seats in the House of Councillors. Not bad.

3) The party secretariat is the DPJ's secretariat with a few tweaks. Tatsumi sees reappointment of the DPJ leadership as a weakness, with too few new faces to generate excitement (the one new face in the bunch, attack dog Policy Research Chair YAMAO Shiori, has been slapped back with a financial scandal). One could also turn the analysis around and see a merger where one team's members kept all the important posts and the other team's members, including some with titanic egos (Eda Kenji) got essentially nothing as a pretty sweet deal for that first team.

Representative
OKADA Katsuya (DPJ)

Acting Representatives
EDA Kenji (JIP)
NAGATSUMA Akira (DPJ)
RENHO (DPJ)

Secretary-General
EDANA Yukio (DPJ)

Policy Research Chair
YAMAO Shiori (DPJ)

Elections Council Chair
GEMBA Koichiro (DPJ)

Diet Affairs Council Chair
AZUMI Jun (DPJ)

House of Councillors Chair
GUNJI Akira (DPJ)

4) With the Will They/Won't They/Why Don't They phase completed, the opposition can now turn to the important business of coordinating Diet and electoral actions against the still immensely powerful but increasingly less likable Liberal Democratic Party of Abe Shinzo.

For The LDP And Mr. Abe, A Worst Case Scenario

Sometime early next week, or perhaps sooner, the major news organizations will be presenting their most likely outcomes of the 14 December 2014 House of Representatives elections. These outlooks will be based on reporting and polling from the prefectural and regional bureaus, combined with sophisticated analysis of past voting records and a jaundiced view toward voter turnout, which, if one goes by the traditional indicator questions of "How much interest do you have in the upcoming election?" and "How definite is your wish to go to the polls on election day?" is on course for a historical and possibly delegitimizing low.

However, let us assume, for argument's sake, turnout is closer to historical norms, i.e., greater than 59%. And let us assume, and this would not be for argument's sake but simply because it can be inferred, that every additional voter showing up will be voting against the Liberal Democratic Party, both in the district and the proportional vote, save in the districts where the choice is between an LDP candidate and a Japan Communist Party (JCP) candidate.

What happens?

I took a look on Monday at the projected list of candidates in all 295 districts. Based upon that list and small set of rules-of-thumb, I tried to arrive at an estimate of the worst possible reasonably plausible result for the ruling LDP/Komeito coalition.

My rules-of-thumb for the districts were:

- When an LDP candidate and a Democratic Party of Japan candidate with an equal number of elections to the Diet face off in a district, the LDP candidate wins.

- When an LDP candidate faces off against a DPJ or a Japan Innovation Party candidate with a higher number of elections to the Diet, the opposition candidate wins.

- When and LDP candidate faces off against a DPJ candidate and a candidate from the JIP, and neither the DPJ nor the JIP candidate has two or more elections to the Diet than the LDP member, the LDP candidate wins. If either the DPJ or the JIP candidate has two more elections to the Diet than the LDP candidate, an opposition candidate wins.

- If an LDP candidate faces off against a DPJ candidate or a JIP candidate of any status, and a Party of the Future Generations candidate is also in the running, the LDP candidate loses.

- The Komeito wins all 9 of its district electoral contests.

- Veteran candidates with more than 7 elections to the Diet win their districts, irrespective of party allegiance.

In the proportional seats I took the median values of the "likely to vote for in the proportional half of the ballot" question answers found in the Mainichi Shimbun and Kyoto News polls, and apportioned the 180 proportional seats accordingly. This left a huge clot of seats with no party assignation, as the voters in the surveys were undecided or had no opinion. Based upon the Theory of Wild Guesses, I apportioned the proportional votes of these undecided/uncaring voters according to the following pattern:

3 for the LDP
2 for the DPJ
1 for the JIP
1 for the Communists
1 for the Komeito
0.2 for the Democratic Socialist Party (Socialists)
0.2 for the People's Life Party (Life)
0.2 for the Party for Future Generations (PFG)

After applying the above rules, and a fudge factor consisting of just being mean to a handful of candidates whom I find unattractive ("There is no way you are going to win again, you rodent!") I ended up with the following "if everything goes right for the DPJ and everything goes wrong for the LDP" election outcome:



Pretty wild results, admittedly.

- The LDP loses only 48 seats -- remember this is a worst case scenario -- and with their Komeito allies finish 9 seats above the crucial 266 seat "absolute safety" line where the coalition possess both all the chairs of Diet committees and a greater than 50% majority in all the committees -- meaning that any and all coalition-sponsored legislation passes out of committee without incident.

- The DPJ hits its goal of three figures with plenty to spare.

- The Communists nearly triple their representation. Yikes.

- The JIP, despite having two dynamic leaders in Eda Kenji and Hashimoto Toru, gets mauled.

This is just a first approximation. Probably a lot more independents with local followings will get through (the drop in the independents number looks suspect). Remember also this is assuming that a lot more folks vote than the major news organizations currently think are likely to show up at the polls.

More later.

Later - The major news organizations have checked in with their projections, based upon their internal numbers...and they are saying the coalition ends up with greater than 300 seats.

The Yomiuri Shimbun (Link -J)

The Asahi Shimbun (Link -J)

Interestingly, or perhaps not, they find the same surge for the Communists I noted in my above "worst case for the LDP" scenario.

Party At Watanabe Yoshimi's: An Early Post-Mortem

The steady if unspectacular rise of the Your Party (Minna no to - "Everyone's Party") Japan's answer to Germany's Free Democrats, the most liberal (in the classical, Edmund Burke sense of the word) party ever in postwar Japanese politics, is history. (Link)

The rupture in between party leader Watanabe Yoshimi and his former secretary-general Eda Kenji occurred months ago, leading to a peculiar situation of an authoritarian leader and his rebel former second-in-command cohabiting in utter contempt of each other. However it took the passage of the Special Secrets Protection Act, and the public role the Your Party played in transforming the Liberal Democratic Party's bill into law, to convince a decent number of Your Party members of the Diet to join Eda in defecting.

On the surface, Your Party did no worse in its attempt to modify the LDP draft secrets bill than the other two parties -- the New Komeito and the Japan Restoration Party -- who co-sponsored the bill. All three failed to demand from the LDP the severe changes the bill needed to serve its ostensible purpose of protecting Japanese citizens from possible harm. Fooled and/or perhaps tempted by the prospect of influencing an overwhelmingly powerful LDP, the three parties asked for only the weakest of amendments -- which a bemused LDP leadership, in a false show of magnanimity, gleefully accepted. In the case of the JRP's proposals, the LDP took the liberty of accepting the JRP ideas that made a bad bill even worse while ignoring the proposals suggesting a setting of limits on bureaucratic power. The JRP's humiliation at this cherry-picking -- which, to be fair, was inherent in the JRP's ridiculous mix of ideas -- led the JRP to boycott the final vote in the House of Representatives, leaving the New Komeito and the Your Party (minus some defectors led by Eda) to swallow their pride and vote for the monstrosity.

Classing the Your Party as a party in opposition has always been problematic. Your Party, despite its reformist creed, sat on the sidelines and cast stones during the brief three years a Democratic Party of Japan-led coalition was in power. Effectively if not openly Your Party was a cat's paw of the disgraced LDP, scratching and often wounding the upstart Democrats.

Once the change in power reversed itself last December, the Your Party has a right to take a seat at the table. It did not, however, leaving Eda and others in the party wondering what the party's role was. If all that the Your Party could glean from having been an agent of the LDP was a few more seats in the Diet, then the quid pro quo, such as it was, was unfulfilling. Collaboration with the LDP to tear down the Democrats should have resulted in significant influence on policy if the silent bargain was to be seen as worthwhile.

Your Party's survival as an entity entered a critical phase when it entered into negotiations with the LDP on the secrecy bill. No one could ignore the glaring contradiction in between the party's stated goals of trimming the powers of the bureaucracy and the secrecy bill's stunning bequest of power to the bureaucrats to wall off information from the public eye.

What doomed Your Party solidarity was what should have been the party's ace-in-the-hole: party leader Watanabe's close personal friendship with Prime Minister Abe Shinzo. Watanabe was one of a trio -- who with Abe formed a quartet jokingly called the "Abe Road Group" -- that pushed Abe in August of 2012 to run for the presidency of the LDP. Watanabe and Abe dined together and have kept in constant contact, even as the Your Party was in supposed opposition to the LDP.

That Watanabe could not capitalize on his friendship with the head of the ruling party, by getting more from the LDP in terms of concessions on issues supposedly vital to the Your Party, begged the question as to what, if anything, membership in the Your Party meant, as an electoral platform and in terms of influence on policy and governance.

The answer, according to yesterday's 14 defectors, is that it meant nothing -- which left them no recourse but to follow their instincts for self-preservation.

The fission of the Your Party poses a question to all the smaller parties in the Diet, including the come-hell-or-high-water LDP ally the New Komeito. With the LDP in such a dominant position, and given fates of the smaller parties that have taken part in ruling coalitions or coalitions of convenience over the past 15 years, what can a party do to retain relevance on the policy front while remaining viable as a political entity?

Later - Many thanks to the anonymous commenter who noted the error in the title.

Live Shinzo, Defending

Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has just finished a national televised address and press conference. He offered a long explanation and spirited defense of the Special Secrets Protection Act, the law that has threatened to swallow his broader agenda*. The reasons he provided for the new law were superficially convincing, which may be sufficient to halt the skid in his Cabinet's popularity ratings (the public poll TBS was flogging prior to the broadcast showed only a minor 5 point month-on-month fall in the Cabinet support numbers but an enormous 14.5 point rise over the same span in the negative "Do Not Support" rating, devouring the "Don't know" ambivalent voters. Polarizing indeed has this Cabinet become). Anyone who spending any time examining his explanations would find the holes, such as when he used the Algeria massacre of January this year as a reason for a need for smoothed paths of communications in between intelligence services. That such communications would have had zero effect on the outcome at the natural gas plant is, of course, not something the PM is willing to concede.

In response to a question regarding the Cabinet's having lost the plot as regards economic policy, the PM gave a hearty response, listing the various spending and industrial policy initiatives passed during the brief extraordinary session. The PM indicated he appreciates that it is hard to call the just concluded session "The Diet Session For The Realization Of The Economic Growth Stategy" -- which is what he predicted in October would become the shorthand used to characterize this particularly Diet term.

All in all it was a pretty good performance. However, the PM's focusing on the votes taken, rather than on how the legislation enacted will result in the satisfaction of particular policy goals, is reminiscent of the paralytic execution disease that gripped him in 2006-07. Execution is important but it is not an end in and of itself. It should not ever be construed as a substitute for achievement.

It is hard for the PM resist the cult of execution, perhaps even harder now than in 2006-07. During this stint in office he has been spending a lot of private time with go-getter corporate executives, many of whom have only a weak grasp of politics and little appreciation of the softer arts of persuasion.


Later - NHK News has a new public opinion poll out. Support for the Cabinet fell 10 points, from 60% to 50%, over the last month, with the "Do Not Support" number rising 10 points to 35%. In terms of the parties, support for the Liberal Democratic Party fell 5.2 points from month to month, with the Democratic Party of Japan siphoning off the largest portion (+2.6% since last month) of the lost support.

-------------------

* Bad as the fight for as the passage of the Special Secrets Protection Act has been for the LDP, it has been much worse for the parties -- the New Komeito, the Japan Restoration Party and the Your Party -- that submitted the bill alongside the LDP. The stresses from having supported the Act precipitated today's fission of the Your Party, with former secretary-general Eda Kenji leading 14 fed up Diet members out in search of more strongly anti-LDP pastures. (Link)