A grand coalition for Japan was a very bad idea

FE Team | Published: November 17, 2007 00:00:00 | Updated: February 01, 2018 00:00:00

Gerald Curtis
THE aborted agreement of Yasuo Fukuda, prime minister, an Ichiro Ozawa, Democratic party president, to have their parties form a grand coalition has accomplished the seemingly impossible task of making Japanese politics even more dysfunctional than it was before. The good news is that their effort failed. A grand coalition under current political circumstances in Japan is a bad idea, drawing too much on a false analogy with Germany under Chancellor Angela Merkel. The SPD, the junior partner in the German grand coalition, is the oldest party in Germany and the largest in membership. It has a distinct and broad social base. It can go into coalition without losing its identity and into an election with policy goals and a party image that set it apart from its conservative party partner.
That is not the situation in Japan. The DPJ is the country's youngest party and its social base is hard to distinguish from the LDP's. It is a conservative party, most of whose members are there and not in the LDP because of electoral district circumstances, and personality and factional conflict.
A grand coalition in Japan, given the state of party politics, would probably turn out to be a grand amalgamation. The LDP would entice some DPJ lower house incumbents to run in the next election on the LDP ticket, eviscerating the DPJ's numbers and further weakening its identity. Other, smaller parties would not be able to put up a fight under Japan's now predominantly single-member district system. At the height of LDP dominance, the political opposition, even if unable to grasp governmental power, had the numbers and the energy required to provide a semblance of the checks and balances that political democracy requires. A grand coalition under present conditions would leave Japan without an effective political party opposition and the voters without a meaningful choice.
It is difficult to overstate the extent of the DPJ's predicament in the aftermath of the Ozawa caper. There were many sensible people in the party who argued that they should compromise with the LDP on important issues, especially with respect to the maritime self-defence forces deployment to the Indian Ocean to supply fuel and water to US and other ships of the coalition forces operating in Afghanistan, But Mr Ozawa rejected any compromise on this or other issues.
He then did an about-face, secretly negotiating the details of a grand coalition, which, according to some reports, went as far as to specify the cabinet posts that would be allotted to each party. Criticism of his behaviour both from within the DPJ and among the public can only grow stronger. It is giving Mr Ozawa too much credit to conclude that he has a game plan. He has proved time and again that he is a tactician, not a strategist. He throws the dice without much thought as to how they will land and then reacts to the situation that confronts him. But this may well be the end of his game.
So far, Mr Fukuda has escaped criticism because everyone is so startled by what Mr Ozawa has done. However, Mr Fukuda, too, faces the prospect of a harsh public reaction when people think about what he tried to do. It would have been one thing to have called a lower house election and, in the event that neither the LDP nor the DPJ obtained a commanding majority, conclude that there was public support for a coalition government. But the voters were never given the chance to express their will. The Fukuda-Ozawa negotiations were conducted in secrecy, giving neither party members nor the public an opportunity to express an opinion about what was intended to be a fundamental reordering of Japan's party politics.
Now that the prospect of a grand coalition has crumbled, the LDP and the DPJ have to rethink their strategies if Japan is to avoid total political paralysis. The DPJ needs to grasp the opportunity to show the public that its options are not only unbending opposition or collusion but include a readiness to seek responsible compromise on critical domestic and foreign policy issues. The LDP, too, needs to embrace a new approach to policy consultation, one that shows a willingness to forge agreements openly arrived at with the opposition. The question is whether the leaders of either party have the necessary imagination and determination to move Japan in this direction.
It is commonly said that people get the politics they deserve. But that is not a fair statement to make about Japan today. The Japanese people deserve better.
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The writer is Burgess professor of-political science at Columbia University
â€”â€“ FT Syndication Service