JAPAN’S PRIME MINISTER Naoto Kan on Thursday sidestepped a parliamentary motion of no-confidence, but only by promising that he will depart once the country further recovers from its post-disaster crisis. Specifically he suggested he had a responsibility to see through the Fukushima Dai-Ichi power plant crisis, hinting at the further six months its plant owners have said it will take at a minimum to achieve a cold shutdown. Others see his borrowed time as shorter – party colleague and former Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, who had threatened to vote him down, pointedly suggesting that Kan could resign this month.
Political longevity and Japanese premierships are not, it seems, mutually compatible. The hapless Kan may just reach his one-year anniversary in June, a feat that none of his four predecessors, from both main parties, achieved. In the last 20 years only one, Junichiro Koizumi, lasted more than three years.
In the end dozens of members of the ruling Democratic Party backed off their threat to support the motion but, as Hatoyama warned, mending the party “won’t be easy”. Continued squabbling and a factionalism in the NDP, akin to that which traditionally bedevilled the old ruling party, the Liberal Democrats, appear inevitable, dashing the hopes of many that the NDP would be the new broom championing radical political reform and which propelled it to power in 2009.
The prime minister’s lacklustre leadership on the stagnation, budget and soaring debt in the economy, already causing him party difficulties, has been compounded by what the opposition and public have seen as his slow disaster relief response in the wake of the tsunami which left 25,000 dead, and his mishandling of the nuclear crisis at the nuclear plant. The urgency of the plight of hundreds of thousands displaced in the north east of the country – 100,000 still in evacuation centres – has not been matched in the political system by either the badly needed vision for a relief and reconstruction process, or the legislation or special budgets needed to fund it.
A widespread hope that the disaster and the reconstruction challenge might prove a catalyst to change in the political system and help forge a unity of purpose in the largely discredited political class has been disappointed. And the reality is that whoever takes over the reins from Kan will inherit a poisoned chalice, all the divisions and paralysis which have plagued the party. There is no certainty that the NDP will even survive as far as the next lower house elections in 2013.