(圖片來源：Wikimedia Commons，Supercheap Auto store in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales。)
Now that Yoshihiko Noda has been made Japan's revolving door prime minister, tongues are wagging in Tokyo about how long he is going to stay in the saddle. The chances are that he won't last until the lower house of the Diet has to be dissolved by September next year. In other words, only 11 months at the longest.
That is not to say he is less capable than his immediate predecessor Naoto Kan, but Kan has something to do with the expected short life of the new Cabinet.
Let's take a look at the Democratic Party's leadership election.
Noda was far, far behind the top contender, former Foreign Minister Seiji Maebara in a latest straw poll, only 5 percent against the latter's 53.6 percent, but won the party leadership anyway in the smoke-filled room where only Democratic members of the Diet voted. That means the ruling party of Japan simply did not care what its eligible voters really wanted in a new premier for a country in crisis.
As none of the five candidates won a majority in the first vote, the two forerunners were given a runoff, and that's when Kan and his core supporters and those of Maebara's and two other candidates threw their support to Noda. They did this in order to get rid of Banri Kaieda who had the support of the power behind the scenes, Ichiro Ozawa, and former Premier Yukio Hatoyama.
Factionalism fractures all Japanese political parties, the Democratic Party of Japan in particular. The fact that five candidates could not make a horse trading shows the ruling party is a house divided against itself. It is afraid of Ozawa's dominance, and the four leaders of all other factions had to gang up to defeat his front man Kaieda in the runoff.
On the other hand, the governing party can't afford to have a clean break with Ozawa, who is acting more than Kakuei Tanaka in the reign of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) under Yasuhiro Nakasone. The Tanaka faction was the largest in the LDP then, and Tanaka, convicted in the famous Lockheed scandal, couldn't try to retake the premiership he had lost.
There is not a chance that the new prime minister, the sixth in five years, can get Japan out of its economic and financial trouble in just a year. He has to achieve a unity within his party, which is next to impossible to say the least, and navigate a gridlocked Parliament to get the deflation-weakened economy to recover and chip away the mountain of national debt. That's a tall order even for a coalition government in time of crisis, not to mention the Cabinet of one party that does not have a safe majority in the lower house of Parliament and is a minority in its upper house.
As a matter of fact, Ozawa is the man who makes and breaks the Democratic Party. Without him, the party could not have ended the Liberal Democratic Party's half century of rule. And without him, the party will get back into opposition in no time. This love-hate relationship between Ozawa's and other factions continues to harass the Democratic Party whether in power or in opposition.
All this shows that the days of Noda's Cabinet are numbered on inauguration. Try as it may to muddle through its limited term, the Noda administration is likely to be shorter-lived. Whoever succeeds Noda can't do anything to make the Democratic Party remain in power after the scheduled general election by the end of September 2012.
〈本文僅供參考，不代表本會立場〉
（本文刊載於100.9.7 The China Post 4版 ）
楊朝祥
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2018年4月24日 08:19
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11月22日 15:22
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2007年10月4日 15:04
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