Koizumi's Second Act — page 3

Here's how the gamesmanship worked: By virtue of his office, Koizumi has the power to call parliamentary general elections at any time. He could have scheduled them even before this week's party-leadership elections. But Koizumi understood that sitting parliamentarians will have a much easier time getting re-elected with him around than without him. That's why he announced as early as July that he would probably call for elections as soon as possible after the presidential balloting. The declaration was a dare to those in his own party: Did individual LDP Diet members really think they could win re-election in their home districts so soon after toppling him? This was no empty posturing. "If he's not re-elected, the LDP will not survive his defeat," says Gerald Curtis, a professor of political science at Columbia University. "There will be a lot of jumping off that ship. The LDP will break up."

Koizumi's brinkmanship quickly caused panic among the Old Guard. Forced to choose between fielding a unified opposition candidate, backing Koizumi or disintegrating in disagreement, many of the major LDP factions fell apart. Mitsuo Horiuchi's 51-member faction blinked first, when Horiuchi announced that he was letting members vote however they pleased—though he added pointedly that he was voting for Koizumi. More significantly, the 100-member Hashimoto faction, once the largest and most unified in Japanese politics, also blew apart. The milestone was marked by the Asahi Shimbun, a liberal daily, which editorialized: "The days of internal party factions are coming to an end." Just a few days later, Hiromu Nonaka, a senior member of the Hashimoto faction and an unyielding Koizumi opponent, confirmed the death sentence when he unexpectedly announced he was retiring from politics.

The deck is now clearly stacked in Koizumi's favor—so how will he play his winning hand? Much will depend on his margin of victory. If Koizumi snags a landslide, some supporters believe he'll push for the sweeping reforms he has always desired. But this scenario seems overly optimistic. Internally, the rivers of resentment against Koizumi run deep, and most of the LDP stalwarts who hindered his reform last time around are unlikely to change. Take Shizuka Kamei, a die-hard traditionalist also running for party president. Just days before officially announcing his candidacy, Kamei met with TIME and in a passionate near-monologue declared Koizumi's initiatives so fundamentally misguided that he had no choice but to fight them. "Koizumi is pursuing recession-producing policies which are shrinking the country," Kamei said. "I advocate doing the exact opposite of virtually everything Koizumi proposes." Furthermore, Koizumi, ultimately, is a party man, no matter how fervently he paints himself the outsider. Despite his avowed willingness to blow up the LDP in order to stay in power, he'd prefer to change the system from within than to destroy it. That means he may—once again—push reform more slowly than many are hoping. Finally, in exchange for surprise endorsements from Horiuchi and other heavy hitters, Koizumi may have dangled promises to compromise on his more ambitious reforms. He may even oust members of his Cabinet, though it's unlikely he will offer up the most coveted scalp of all—that of finance czar Takenaka, whom the Old Guard particularly dislikes.

A more pressing concern for Koizumi will be simply retaining the LDP's hold on power in the parliamentary elections. That's because, for the first time in a decade, it faces an opposition party with a small but genuine shot at toppling the LDP's virtually unbroken 48-year hegemony. On July 24, Naoto Kan and Ichiro Ozawa—two longtime LDP foes and by far the country's best-known opposition leaders—announced they had decided to set aside their differences and to merge Kan's Democratic Party of Japan (and its 174 sitting Diet members) with Ozawa's Liberal Party (and its 30 Diet members) in an attempt to steal as many of the LDP's 357 seats as possible. The alliance is more of an acquisition, with the Liberal Party agreeing to be absorbed into the DPJ, which will retain Kan as its leader. Ozawa says he's happy to concede leadership to Kan. The most important thing to him, he says, is a unified reform movement that takes on the LDP. Speaking with TIME, Ozawa says: "There has never been a major power shift between the ruling party and the opposition party. Japan needs that power transfer in order for the country to improve, and this is that opportunity." And what's the new DPJ's message? That it is impossible for the LDP to be a force of real change because that party is still locked in Japan's legendary iron triangle of conflicts of interest among government bureaucrats, politicians and corporations: "This power structure feeds the codependency between vested interests, who work to maintain the status quo. We want our political representatives to be accountable. What we're talking about is more of a revolution than reform." Other issues? Democrats are calling for heavier taxes on higher incomes and more diplomatic independence from the U.S. They are scathing about Koizumi's support for the America-led war on Iraq. Says Ozawa: "We shouldn't send troops to support the war effort of individual countries."

No doubt the DPJ will have a difficult time unseating the majority held by the LDP's ruling coalition, though it could steal a significant number of seats. Even though the LDP enjoys a reputation for near invincibility, DPJ backers point out that some 40% of Japanese voters don't view themselves as belonging to any one party. With a truly viable opposition, Kan and Ozawa reason, many voters will no longer view a dissenting vote as a wasted vote. "We are positive that many citizens will support the new party in the light of the many issues that need to be tackled now," Kan told TIME. What's more, traditional strongholds of LDP voting power—such as unions representing postal and construction workers—are not as dependable as they used to be. And the DPJ has a history of performing better than pre-election polls suggest. If Koizumi's presidential election is close and Kan can orchestrate a unified campaign, the grand old party of Japan may have something to worry about.

Koizumi, meanwhile, must be quietly wondering how he will fare in the estimates of future historians. Will they portray him as just another forgettable—if uncharacteristically long-serving—Prime Minister in a depressing line of forgettable Prime Ministers? Or will they remember him as a watershed figure in Japanese politics? The answer may be far closer to the latter than many people think. It's unfair to expect a wholesale restructuring of Japan's political and economic landscape from just one Prime Minister, and a third-generation LDP man at that. But there's no denying that Japanese politics is changing, and Koizumi, more than anyone else, personifies that landmark shift. As Professor Curtis of Columbia sees it, Koizumi is part of a national transformation that began when the Japanese bubble burst in 1989, an arc that includes the end of the cold war, the humiliation of being unable to respond to the first Gulf War, and the LDP's first, brief loss of power in 1993. All of those events contributed to a cultural upheaval, psychological dissonance and political dissatisfaction, says Curtis, that Japan is still trying to digest. In the end, Koizumi may be remembered as the Mikhail Gorbachev of this era in Japan—a crucial but transitional figure. "Koizumi is a force for dismantling the old system," says Curtis, "not necessarily the man to build the new one. It's probably the next guy who will build the new one." Still, considering the enormity of his task and the progress he has already made in undoing decades of political calcification, Koizumi may well go down as a towering figure, after all.

—With reporting by Toko Sekiguchi/Tokyo and Ilya Garger/Hong Kong

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