JAPAN:Hopes that Yasou Fukuda would heal his party's fortunes are fading fast, writes David McNeillin Tokyo
WHEN JAPANESE prime minister Yasuo Fukuda took power from ailing predecessor Shinzo Abe last September, the country heaved a sigh of collective relief. After just a year in office, the inexperienced Mr Abe had proved a divisive figure, out of touch with popular concerns and driven by a nationalist agenda that many distrusted.
The older Mr Fukuda (71) was a diplomat and fence-mender who would heal the divisions in his party and restore its fortunes with the electorate.
Now he too is floundering. A Kyodo News poll released on Friday gives personal approval ratings for the prime minister below 20 per cent, putting him in the same inglorious lame-duck territory as Yoshiro Mori, who limped out of office in 2001 as Japan's most unpopular post-war leader.
Even more alarmingly for the prime minister, his ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is losing the popularity contest with the opposition Democrats (DPJ), whose wily leader Ichiro Ozawa has stalemated the government for six months. Half the public now wants to see the DPJ in power, according to the poll, nearly twice the number that hopes the LDP-led coalition keeps going.
The Democrats already control parliament's upper house, following Mr Abe's disastrous electoral mauling year, and they are gunning for the more powerful lower chamber. After half a century of almost unbroken LDP rule, a fearsome prospect looms for Mr Fukuda: could he go down as the man who finally broke one of the world's most indestructible political machines?
A single, badly timed decision partly explains the recent dip in the polls. Last week, the government reintroduced an unpopular petrol tax, hiking the cost of an average full tank by about €10 just before a week-long national holiday.
The tax has long been used to pay for highways and is seen as a sop to Japan's powerful "road tribe" - politicians with links to the construction industry.
Mr Fukuda has promised to wrench the $25 billion it raises annually out of the hands of the construction politicians, but the electorate is not buying it.
However, the roots of the prime minister's problems ultimately go much deeper than rising petrol prices, and point to the political weakening of the LDP.
Because the party no longer controls both houses, the government has had to railroad unpopular Bills into law by relying on a rarely used constitutional provision that essentially allows it to bypass the opposition-run upper chamber.
Last year, Mr Fukuda employed the tactic to ram through long-delayed legislation allowing Japan's self-defence forces to continue supporting US forces in Afghanistan, accelerating his slide in the polls. A largely secret attempt during the negotiations on the Bill to patch up a "grand coalition" with the Democrats did Mr Fukuda few favours when it later became public.
The LDP is also losing the support of many core constituents, including older voters infuriated by the government's handling of a bureaucratic bungle that has lost 20 million pension records, probably forever.
Millions more are reeling from rising prices, stagnating wages and a relatively new phenomenon for Japan: growing inequalities.
With the real prospect of Mr Fukuda's government imploding, the Democrats are demanding a general election. Their case was strengthened last week by a landslide Democrat win in a byelection in the LDP stronghold of Yamaguchi Prefecture, widely seen a test of Mr Fukuda's popularity.
Amid this turmoil, all eyes this week will be on the domestic impact of a five-day state visit by Chinese president Hu Jintao, who arrives in Tokyo tomorrow.
The summit, which should have played to the famously Sino-friendly Mr Fukuda's diplomatic strengths, is instead laced with political poison. While the two will highlight improving ties and booming trade, the trip is already overshadowed by the Tibet controversy, which is likely to dog Mr Hu, with obvious risks for the Japanese leader.
Soft peddle on Tibet and Mr Fukuda will be blamed for caving in to Chinese pressure; say too much and he could offend his guests, inflaming anti-Japanese opinion in an already restless China.
Time will tell if Mr Fukuda is soon set to become part of the great revolving-door tradition of Japanese leaders, six of whom have warmed the prime minister's seat while Bertie Ahern has been in office. Rumours abound that conservative favourite Taro Aso is already measuring the curtains for Mr Fukuda's office.
But the coalition government still controls two-thirds of the upper house and the LDP is unlikely to dump its leader ahead of the G8 summit in July.
That gives the prime minister another couple of months before the political knives start being sharpened. Some newspapers report that he intends only to remain in office longer than Mr Abe - 366 days - giving him another four months. Few expect him to stay longer.
