The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) Presidential election has only just kicked off, and yet even before it began it was clear that LDP Chief Cabinet Secretary, Abe Shinzo, was going to walk away with an easy victory. Public interest is already shifting away from the election itself and is now focusing on the future policy implications of Abe’s comments.

Abe will become Party President -and Prime Minister- backed by an LDP in possession of overwhelming electoral support. It would be easy to argue that he has the capacity to oversee an administration with greater Prime Ministerial control than even that of the Koizumi regime. In reality, however, Abe may find his ability for direct personal leadership to be somewhat more limited.

This difference is already glaringly apparent: Abe is currently suggesting offering the opponents of the Postal Privatization Bill, expelled from the LDP during last year’s General Election, the hand of forgiveness and the chance to ‘try again’. Koizumi last year omitted such mainstays of the LDP as Tamisuke Watanuki, Takeo Hiranuma and Shizuka Kamei, with the brusque comment, “politics is pitiless”. Abe, on the other hand, cannot afford to play Koizumi-style politics. Informed by LDP decision-makers in the House of Councilors that without this rebel camp back in the party, victory in next year’s Upper House election will be an impossibility, Abe must deal with the issue as a matter of political survival.

It was with this in mind that he said yesterday, “there are those who have shed blood, sweat and tears for the LDP, over many long years. If indeed they wish it, we should naturally consider a way to cooperate closely.”

Surprising was Koizumi’s response. Far from being angry, he merely commented that “alliance and rupture” was “the way of the world”. Koizumi himself last year ranked Postal Privatization as the most important part of the ‘overhaul’ of Japan’s economy and Public Services -an unassailable ‘donjon of reform’. As a result, one might have expected his opponents to be dismissed as obstructions to positive change. But, in reality, both the centrality of Postal Privatization, and the current implicit readmission of ‘rebels’, are simply makeshift measures in the attempt to win elections.

As people increasingly lose faith in politics, the effects of this spin will doubtlessly go beyond a simple decline in Koizumi’s ratings: The reverberations will be felt at the very heart of democratic politics.

(Translated by R.J.F. Villar)