Japanese Vote in Crucial Election (current regime likely to win)

Associated Press via Yahoo! News ^ | 2005 Sep 11 | Joseph Coleman

[Wiz]

TOKYO - It sounds like mission impossible: Take the developed world's longest-ruling political party, one weighed down by a history of corruption, waste and patronage, and turn it into a symbol of dynamic change.

Japanese voters were deciding Sunday whether Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has accomplished that task for his Liberal Democratic Party during elections for the 480 seats in the powerful lower house of Parliament.

"I think we need reform to adjust to changing times," said Michitoshi Koroki, a 68-year-old voter outside a polling station in Tokyo. "But it's a matter of how to change, so it's not easy to know what party to vote for."

The balloting capped a dramatic campaign that has broken new ground in postwar Japanese history, heralding the emergence of media-driven image politics and a sharper focus on policy, in this case Koizumi's quest to privatize the cash-rich postal service as part of economic reforms.

"I want to hear the people's opinion," Koizumi howled into a clutch of microphones at a campaign stop at a Tokyo train station Saturday afternoon. "Please vote for candidates who support postal privatization!"

Media polls suggested that was what voters would do, pointing to a strong showing by the LDP. Some surveys indicated the party, which has ruled for almost all of the past 50 years, would strengthen its majority.

Candidates battled down to the final minutes of the campaign Saturday over a large bloc of undecided voters.

On the outskirts of Tokyo, Koizumi's main rival, Katsuya Okada, leader of the Democratic Party of Japan, argued that the country has more pressing concerns than the postal service, such as the strained pension system and burgeoning government debt.

"Japan faces problems of decreasing population, an aging society and increasing national debts," Okada said. "Mr. Koizumi sounds as if life will be all rosy if the postal service is privatized, but no one takes what he says seriously."

Koizumi, however, has skillfully dominated the agenda during the campaign with his plan to put the postal service's $3 trillion in assets into private hands as a way to make the money available for investment in Japan's struggling economy.

When his pet project to split up and sell off Japan Post's mail, insurance and savings services was torpedoed by parliament's upper house Aug. 8, he dissolved the lower house and called early elections, saying the ballot would be a referendum on reform.

Since then the bachelor prime minister, who sports a silvery mop-top and a passion for opera, has kept voters riveted by purging 37 anti-reform lawmakers from his party. He drafted celebrity candidates, including a TV chef and an Internet mogul, to run as "assassins" against his enemies.

The drama has fascinated a country long accustomed to candidate lists full of LDP backroom wheeler-dealers whose only competition came from a splintered and ineffectual leftist opposition.

The party's image had sunk so low that when Koizumi took the reins in 2001 the LDP was widely considered a spent force that would collapse once a viable opposition emerged. Now he is seen as one of the most dynamic Japanese political personalities of the postwar era.

"He's accomplished the impossible," said Gerald Curtis, an expert in Japanese politics at Columbia University in New York. "He's turned the DPJ ... into a party that's against change, and he's turned LDP, a party that's resisted (change), into the symbol of reform."

Koizumi's gambit has given Japan's famously conservative voters the chance to vote for reform while not having to go with an untested opposition.

"I support him — he's better than the politicians we've had up to now," Sadako Eto, 64, said after watching Koizumi speak in Tokyo. "You can't really trust in the Democrats. The LDP has run Japan for 50 peaceful years, so it's better to maintain that stability."

While most Japanese are fuzzy on the details, Koizumi's bid to privatize the post office seems to appeal on several fronts: Its "neo-liberal" push to loosen up the economy sounds modern and it capitalizes on the rising tide in Japan against a bloated bureaucracy.

Koizumi argues that putting Japan Post's $3 trillion into private hands would provide for more efficient use of capital and help jump-start the economy.

The plan, however, has strong critics even within the LDP. Many in rural areas — the traditional bedrock of LDP support — fear privatization will reduce services, while the postal workers union fears job cuts. And the postal savings accounts have long served as a slush fund for LDP pork-barrel projects blamed for waste and corruption.

"In the past, the LDP ran the country, but nothing has changed," said Masatoshi Kido, 28, a firefighter who listened to Okada on Saturday. "They just keep increasing taxes over and over and life is getting more and more difficult."

[Wiz]

This is the second election of September throughout the world, as far as I know, after the election in Egypt. The opposition could not remove Mubarak in the election of Egypt. In the election of Japan, the polls show that the current regime which supports the Iraq War likely to win with more seats. One week later, there will be elections in Afghanistan and Germany.

[sushiman]

" current regime "

Plutocracy with a monopoly on power ...

" likely to win "

About as " likely " as at least one Mexican crossing the US/Mexican border illegally within the next 72 hours ...