Japan's Prime Minister riding high ahead of poll

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was riding high today in the homestretch of the campaign for weekend parliamentary elections, boosted by polls forecasting a comfortable win by the party that has ruled Japan for a half-century.

A triumph in the Sunday balloting for the Liberal Democratic Party would be a personal victory for Koizumi, who has put his job on the line by making the vote a referendum on his two-decade quest to privatise Japan’s mammoth postal service.

Newspaper polls show the LDP – which has ruled Japan almost continuously since 1955 – is on its way to clinching most of the 480 seats up for grabs in the powerful lower house. The opposition Democrats were expected to finish a distant second.

Combined with seats held by ally New Komeito Party, such a victory would grant Koizumi – a solid US ally – a mandate for his plan to split up and sell off Japan Post’s delivery, savings and insurance services, creating the world’s largest private bank.

An LDP win would also bolster Koizumi’s standing as one of the most dynamic Japanese political personalities of the post-war era. After losing a vote on postal reform in the upper house on August 8, Koizumi – prime minister since 2001 – took a bold gamble by dissolving the lower house and calling snap elections.

The campaign that followed has been the most riveting in recent memory in Japan, as Koizumi purged 37 anti-reform politicians from his party and drafted celebrity candidates, including a former beauty queen and an internet mogul, to run as “assassins” against his enemies.

The drama has fascinated a country long accustomed to highly scripted campaigns without burning issues or distinctive personalities. One poll forecast turnout would be 75%, a hefty jump over the 60% participation in the last lower house elections in 2003.

“This election is definitely different,” said Masaru Mori, a retired worker from an IT company. “It is an election that may break away the established order – it’s different from the halfhearted elections of the past.”

The rise of the LDP also threatens to blunt the growth of the Democrats, the largest opposition group and the party that many had hoped would turn Japan’s essentially one-party state into a competitive, two-party system.

The DPJ has made impressive gains in elections in 2003 and last year, and leader Katsuya Okada’s dead-earnest persona and attention to policy details were considered by supporters to be an antidote to Koizumi’s sometimes flippant management style.

Okada laboured during the campaign to shift the spotlight on what he argued were Koizumi’s failings – the financially troubled pension system, the lack of social services that block women from the work force, and dearth of meaningful reform.

But Okada appeared to have failed to capture the attentions of the public, and never managed to shift the focus away from Koizumi’s postal reform proposal. The DPJ also suffers from doubts among many in Japan that it is ready to take the reins of government – even among those fed up with the LDP.

“I am tired of the LDP but I feel I cannot trust the DPJ yet,” said Eri Horisaki, a 21-year-old university student in Tokyo. “I don’t know yet what the DPJ can really do.”

A poll in the Nihon Keizai newspaper today showed the LDP with 54% of the vote in single-seat districts, and 52% in proportional representation districts, in which voters cast ballots for parties rather than individual candidates.

The Mainichi newspaper, meanwhile, showed support for Koizumi at 51% – high for a Japanese prime minister who has been in office so long. With more than four years at the helm, Koizumi is one of Japan’s longest-serving post-war premiers.

Koizumi has also been boosted by the economy, which is showing strong signs of emerging from more than a decade of stagnant growth. The stock market is rallying, the job market is the best in years, bad debts at banks have dwindled.

Still, it is uncertain whether a Koizumi victory would really usher in the era of reform that he is promising. Many factions in the LDP are opposed to deep change, and the prime minister says he will step down at the end of his term in a year, leaving the future course of the LDP unclear.