Japanese politics: Taking up arms

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THE announcement on November 18th by Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, that he was calling a snap general election was made to sound a bold one. The poll would in effect be a referendum on postponing a planned second rise in the consumption tax, Mr Abe declared—as if to show that he was defying his country’s fiscal hawks. He also urged citizens to use their vote to show what they thought of his reform policies, commonly known as Abenomics, which he has presented as Japan’s only means of ending years of stagnation.

It was stirring rhetoric, yet in reality there is little call for an election just now—and little risk of Mr Abe being defeated. After the surprise news a day earlier that Japan had slipped into a technical recession over the summer, not even opposition parties now oppose delaying the tax increase. The elections will reconstitute the lower house of Japan’s parliament, the Diet. But Mr Abe’s government already wields a powerful majority in both houses that is guaranteed until 2016.

The newly published data showed that GDP had shrunk by 1.6% on an annualised basis in the third quarter (see chart). This followed a contraction of 7.3% in the second quarter that many blamed on an initial rise in the consumption (value-added) tax, from 5% to 8%, in April. That made it easy for Mr Abe to delay the next tax hike until April 2017, when nothing short of a full-blown financial crisis, he pledged, would prevent a further rise—vital, as the fiscal conservatives see it, to repairing Japan’s parlous public finances.

Many politicians are ill-prepared for the rapid-fire campaign due to unfold after December 2nd, the official start. MPs were not expecting a snap election until next summer, after a series of local polls in the spring. The news of recession certainly makes it tricky to produce a slick campaign message about Abenomics. The government had been expecting growth of around 1% in the third quarter. Politicians could then have asserted that the economy had pulled clear of the gloom that followed the first consumption-tax rise. As it is, many MPs are unsure about what to tell their local vote-winning organisations, known as koenkai, says Kotaro Tamura, a political lobbyist and former legislator in Mr Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The implication that the economy is too weak to stand up to a second consumption-tax rise even a year from now would appear to signal that Abenomics is failing.

Hence the immediate reaction to the news of a snap poll was one of bemusement. The public at large, as well as many in the LDP, are united in asking: why now? Polls show that there is little appetite for an election. In some constituencies LDP officials are even grumbling publicly. In Gifu prefecture, in central Japan, a party chapter adopted a formal resolution to oppose holding a national poll. It urged the government to dedicate itself to economic recovery instead of risking a political vacuum.

Mr Abe already has strong backing for delaying the tax increase, but his election may have other uses. Many Japanese hope that if he emerges, as expected, with a renewed mandate, extended for another four years, he may at last muster the courage to get on with badly needed reforms to the labour market and to Japan’s agriculture. In addition, the LDP has an asset: it can count on the opposition’s disarray.

Since its humbling defeat in 2012, the biggest group, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), has struggled to find candidates foolhardy enough to stand against the LDP in the countryside. Its support has dwindled to under 10%. You might expect the DPJ to co-operate with Ishin no To (Japan Innovation Party), the next biggest in opposition. Yet Ishin no To’s more right-leaning leader, Toru Hashimoto, is resisting.

Voters’ lack of enthusiasm may not harm the LDP and its coalition partner, Komeito. Their powerful get-out-the-vote machines in December 2012 earned them 325 seats out of 480 in the lower house, giving the government a majority of 67%, even though they won fewer votes in total than in 2009, when the DPJ pulled off a landslide. Since Mr Abe’s popularity has been falling in recent months, the LDP will probably lose some of that huge haul, particularly from the proportional-representation slice of the vote, which elects 180 members. Yet if Mr Abe can limit the losses to fewer than 40 seats he will keep a satisfactory majority.

A strong result would help to strengthen Mr Abe’s position within his own party, says Kozo Yamamoto, an LDP politician who helped design Mr Abe’s economic strategy last year. This would strengthen his hand in shaking up his cabinet, which has been battered by scandals and resignations since a reshuffle in September.

But there is still a risk that opponents of Abenomics could muster enough strength to weaken Mr Abe. The loss of an election for the governorship of Okinawa on November 16th, though chiefly the result of local opposition to the American army’s outsized presence on the island chain, showed that the LDP is vulnerable.

For those hoping that a strong election result might re-energise Mr Abe’s reform agenda, it was dispiriting that he made little direct mention of reforms this week. But this may have been tactical: it might repel rural voters, for example, if he were to emphasise the need for progress in negotiations with America and other important trading partners over the formation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade grouping. Farmers worry that their livelihoods would suffer from the pact. A series of reform bills, including one dedicated to women’s empowerment in the economy (a cherished project of Mr Abe’s and one where much has been accomplished) now face deletion from the legislative calendar because of the looming poll.

Yet in delaying the consumption-tax rise against the wishes of the powerful finance ministry Mr Abe has shown that he can face down bureaucrats. It is inside the ministries and the LDP that he encounters the most entrenched resistance to his efforts at reform. His advisers are privately making comparisons to the decision in 2005 by a predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, to call a snap election to seek backing for privatising the postal service. Nothing as yet suggests that December’s election will bring Mr Abe quite the mandate that Mr Koizumi won. But it would make little sense for Mr Abe to seek re-endorsement by voters unless he had a grand purpose.

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