The LDP's first steps towards a new party

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, "The age of the factions is over."

Having already given way to ideological groupings before the election, it is increasingly likely that LDP members will associate more with others sharing their ideas instead of joining factions. Nakagawa Hidenao, an important player in this transition before the election who called for the dissolution of the factions earlier this week, has announced that he will call a meeting of reformists — including Shiozaki Yasuhisa, former chief cabinet secretary — on Monday.

Yamauchi Koichi, a former LDP member who won a PR seat this year for Watanabe Yoshimi's Your Party, has some thoughts about ideological groups within the LDP. One, he says, is the "pure conservative" group of hawks clustered around Aso Taro and Abe Shinzo, about which he says that in their focus upon ideological conflict with the left wing — symbolized by their hatred for Nikkyoso — they will have a difficult time broadening the party's popularity. Another group, led, he says, would be a "liberal" group. Led by Tanigaki Sadakazu, it would resemble the DPJ, with a focus on regions and the creation of a "twentieth-century-style" welfare state. (I'm not quite sure what he means by the label twentieth-century-style.) The third, led by Nakagawa and Shiozaki, is a neo-liberal group, emphasizing small government, administrative reform, economic growth, and free markets. Yamauchi makes clear that he approves of the third as providing the best contrast with the DPJ, which he caricatures as a pork-barreling, big government and twentieth-century-style welfare state-supporting, anti-market, anti-American, anti-globalization political party.

Whatever one thinks as Yamauchi's ideas about which path the LDP should take, his classification scheme is useful. In the forthcoming party election, LDP members will pick one of these courses.

The least coherent is Yamauchi's second group, the "liberal" group. Revealingly, Tanigaki's candidacy for the LDP presidency has the backing of Mori Yoshiro, whose power within the party may have been enhanced by his having narrowly won his single-member district last week — even though Tanigaki does not yet have the support of his own faction, the Koga faction. That Mori would indicate his support for a candidate not from his Machimura faction is a sign of that the power of factions is weakening, but it also suggests that the liberal group is not quite liberal — rather it is the "change as little as possible" group. What, after all, is Mori's ideology? Under the leadership of this group, the LDP's ideological identity would be blurry. While the other two choices would pursue a course of opposing the DPJ at every turn, drawing sharp distinctions between the LDP and the DPJ, the middle group would be a bit more "constructive," answering the government's plans with drafts of its own, perhaps using foreign policy as the issue to separate the two parties.

In short, the LDP's debates are going to resemble the DPJ's debates over the past decade. Should the LDP be "constructivist" or "oppositionist?" The problem for the LDP is that the "oppositionist" line preferred by the conservatives and neo-liberals concedes considerable ground to the DPJ in policy terms, because it means focusing on issues that are less important to the Japanese public than the issues stressed by the DPJ. But this may be a temporary problem.

If the DPJ is successful in power, the oppositionists will be eventually forced to adapt or will be eliminated as the LDP struggles to return to power. Much as the Labour Party became New Labour and the Conservatives have become New Labour-Lite under David Cameron, so the LDP will be forced to become a new LDP that both accepts the changes introduced by a DPJ government and finds a way to critique the DPJ for the inevitable policy failures and corruption scandal that will emerge the longer the party stays in power.

But for now, the oppositionist approach may be the most satisfying as the party tries to reorganize after defeat. I expect that LDP members may be tempted to support a strict oppositionist candidate in this month's presidential election, which would be a natural continuation of the demonization of the DPJ that was central to the party's general election campaign strategy. Will Ishiba Shigeru, a policy wonk trying to position himself as the front runner in the race to replace Aso, be able to tap into the vein of resentment against the DPJ present in large portions of the party?

Ishiba doesn't fit comfortably in any of the aforementioned ideological veins. He is best known as a hawk and a self-described "defense otaku," but he is a defense policy wonk; his hawkishness differs from the cultural hawkishness of Abe and Aso, who view a strong defense more as a cultural imperative than as a "mere" policy matter. He is not particularly well-connected to the neo-liberal group, but he is not particularly traditionalist either. In short, he may be the perfect leader to revive the LDP — if not today, then eventually. He may have a hard time assembling the necessary votes this time around.

One more for Watanabe?

Watanabe Yoshimi, the onetime cabinet minister who left the LDP earlier this year to form a reformist "third force" with independent Eda Kenji, is still preparing to launch a new party before next month's general election. But while the prospects for his incipient (and still nameless) party looked bright as the reformist rebellion against Prime Minister Aso Taro grew, the squelching of the rebellion have raised questions about whether the political system can accommodate a third major party. (Don't even get me started on onetime postal rebel Hiranuma Takeo's own plans for a third major party, a "true" conservative party. Hiranuma now has fifteen candidates in his group, and he is aiming to be in a position to determine who controls the lower house should neither party secure a majority.)

Watanabe may be in a position to pick up individual LDP members fleeing the party like Yamauchi Koichi, but whatever chance that Watanabe would be in a position to provide a political home to a large-scale exodus from the LDP appears to have vanished. Watanabe is in talks with Yamauchi — it's hard to see why Yamauchi wouldn't link up with Watanabe — but Watanabe has been forced to stress his prospective party's focus on "quality over quantity." Nice motto, except that it is difficult to see how his party can make the least bit of difference without an adequate number of members. Indeed, if the LDP's reformists have had a failing over the past several years, it has been their abiding focus on the purity of their principles over building up their numerical strength by compromising with other portions of the party that might share some if not all of their goals.

Watanabe, however, might be able to grab a member from the DPJ. Asao Keiichiro, who has recently gained publicity as the shadow defense minister in the DPJ's "next cabinet," has announced that he will leave the DPJ and campaign as an independent in Kanagawa's fourth district. (Full disclosure: I worked for Asao — especially in his campaign organization in Kanagawa-4 — 2006-2007.) It is ambiguous from press reports precisely what Asao's plan is. There is, after all, a difference between campaigning as an independent and leaving the party. If Asao loses next month, will he remain in the upper house as an independent, or will he return to the DPJ fold? The incumbent in Kanagawa-4 is Hayashi Jun, ostensibly a Koizumi child (he was first elected in 2005), although it appears that Hayashi has solved the reformist's dilemma by not being one: he appears to have positioned himself among the Abe Shinzo-Nakagawa Shoichi conservatives instead of the reformists around Nakagawa Hidenao. Indeed, here he is pictured with General Tamogami Toshio (ret.) at one of Tamogami's speaking engagements. (Incidentally, this reinforces the image of the Abe cabinet as a tenuous coalition of conservatives and reformists, with the conservatives uniting with the bulk of the LDP after Abe's collapse and reformists like Nakagawa Hidenao and Shiozaki Yasuhisa becoming "anti-mainstream.")

It's possible that Asao is confident that his support group is strong enough to draw in the bulk of the DPJ vote in the district, but naturally there is a risk of a split that will enable Hayashi to return to the Diet.

To return to Watanabe, it is possible that Asao could link up with Watanabe. Before Asao decided to leave, Ozawa Ichiro reportedly offered the candidacy in Kanagawa's eighth district, running against Watanabe's partner Eda. The press is interpreting Asao's decision to stay in the fourth district instead of running against Eda as a sign of Asao's willingness to join forces with Watanabe. Perhaps. But he may simply be using the old LDP trick of running as an independent and then rejoining the party should he win the seat — or lose it, as the party would presumably still welcome him back in the upper house seeing as how it needs the seat. Indeed, it was the desire to not lose the seat in the upper house that reportedly led Ozawa to withhold the nomination from Asao.

What Asao's decision does not appear to represent is a fissure within the DPJ. Unlike LDP defectors, Asao appears to be leaving as a matter of personal ambition, not irreconcilable policy differences with the party. As such, I wonder whether he may well make his way back to the DPJ after all. Analysts anticipating a political realignment that consumes both parties should keep looking.

Fleeing a sinking ship?

A week after Nagasaki Kotaro — and his 3600 supporters in Yamanashi's second district — left the LDP, another Koizumi child has bolted the party.

Yamauchi Koichi, a first termer representing Kanagawa's ninth district, had, as discussed in this post, come to recognize the unpleasant situation for reformists in the post-Koizumi LDP. As he said in this post announcing his departure from the LDP, "The current LDP is like a different party from the 'Koizumi LDP' of the general election in 2005." He rejects the backsliding since 2005, and would rather campaign on his own than violate his principles. (Yamamoto Ichita describes Yamauchi, a member of his reform study group, as having a "pure heart.")

In short, Yamauchi may simply have uncommon courage for an LDP politician. He will face a particularly tough reelection fight: the DPJ candidate is Ryu Hirofumi, the incumbent who lost to Yamauchi in 2005 86,673 votes to 82,878 and was resurrected through proportional representation. And that's without considering the possibility that the LDP might send an "assassin" against Yamauchi.

As expected, there appears to be no plan in the works for a large-scale exodus of reformists from the LDP. Instead, it seems that following Tuesday's self-criticism session, the reformists have made a temporary peace with Aso Taro, perhaps following Nakagawa Hidenao's message that the DPJ must be stopped.

In other words, Yamauchi may not be the last reformist to leave the LDP before the general election, but he will most likely not have much company in exile. For many reformists, it seems that likely defeat with the help of LDP resources is preferable to near-certain defeat alone.