A juiceless campaign
The LDP race is contentious but you wouldn't know it from the party's debates
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The Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) leadership campaign is at roughly its halfway point, and with just over a week until the party’s voters decide who will be its next leader and Japan’s next prime minister, the campaign is strangely lacking in excitement. Despite the large field full of candidates who might never get another chance, despite genuine differences in opinion over critical policy issues, and despite each of the three top-tier candidates have meaningful vulnerabilities, the LDP’s campaign has been strangely sedate. As Gerald Curtis told the Mainichi Shimbun:
All of the candidates are polite and well behaved, but there is little debate about how their thinking differs from the other candidates or what’s wrong with the other candidates’ opinions. In Japan too much emphasis is placed on fairness, and, as a result, the nine candidates travel around the country from place to place participating in ‘debates without debate.’
Mainichi noted that the lack of energy was conspicuous on Thursday, when the candidates spoke in the Akihabara station plaza in Tokyo, the “sacred ground” where the late Abe Shinzō would hold forth to large audiences during his “last night” campaign rallies. To the extent that there has been friction between candidates, it is largely offstage, with multiple candidates complaining to party authorities about Takaichi Sanae’s mailer to LDP rank-and-file supporters that was inconsistent with rules decided after it was sent. Even when the candidates have disagreed on policy – on Koizumi Shinjirō’s labor market reform proposal or Kōno Tarō’s proposal that Japan should acquire nuclear submarines – the pushback from other candidates has been restrained. The format is at least partly to blame: with nine candidates, each candidate is extremely limited in the time they have to make their appeals. As Curtis suggests, norms of politeness could also mean that candidates would pay a steep price for overly negative campaigning. I suspect there might also be some intra-party game theory. Because of the “shadow of the future” — these candidates will continue to work closely alongside each other after the election — no candidate has an incentive to battle too hard or attack too personally when today’s rival might be the person who will decide whether one gets a cabinet or leadership post tomorrow.1
As an American, I do not necessarily think Japan should emulate how US political parties have picked their standard bearers in recent elections, but I share Curtis’s questioning whether the Japanese public is particularly well served by how the LDP campaign has unfolded.2 There are meaningful differences in how the different LDP candidates would approach taxes and spending and the deficit; Japan’s relationships with the United States, China, South Korea, and other neighbors; long-term growth policies; and equal rights for women and sexual minorities.3
Instead, the public-facing campaign has been low energy, and public opinion about the candidates has been mostly static. The top three candidates are largely the same three as in August, each having entered the campaign with their voting blocs among rank-and-file members largely settled.4 It is unclear whether anything that has been said or done since the campaign formally began on 12 September has shifted how rank-and-file supporters will vote, aside from perhaps a slight dip in Koizumi’s support and Takaichi’s cementing her status among the top three.
As subdued as the public-facing campaign has been, it has been almost entirely disconnected from the energetic shadow campaign unfolding as the candidates scramble to secure the support of their parliamentary colleagues, particularly in the second round for Takaichi, Koizumi, and Ishiba Shigeru, the three most likely to survive. The factions may not be playing their historic organizing role, but party heavyweights are working hard to influence the outcome, with former prime ministers Suga Yoshihide and Mori Yoshirō working on behalf of Koizumi; Asō Tarō considering his options; and the outgoing Kishida Fumio possibly waiting in the wings as the decisive player in deciding the outcome of the second round. It is ever clearer that the winner ultimately will be the candidate who is best able to bargain with enough of his or her fellow lawmakers, with each of the seven candidates who fail to make the runoff acting as a quasi-faction able to negotiate with the top two finishers for policy and personnel concessions. The sentiments of the LDP’s supporters and the public at large will not be irrelevant to these deliberations – both heavyweights and backbenchers will be considering which candidate has the best chance of preserving the ruling coalition’s large majority, and public opinion has determined which candidates have a serious chance at winning – but ultimately the decisions that will produce Japan’s next prime minister will have little to do with the debates and forums among the nine candidates.
Maybe there are some surprises in store over the final week of the campaign, particularly in the three policy debates from 22-24 September. But thus far it seems unlikely that this campaign will produce stable government after the leadership election, particularly if the eventual winner is burdened with the compromises and bargains needed to win and still has to live with eight ambitious losing candidates. Nor does it seem likely to restore the public’s trust in LDP rule over the longer term, regardless of the bump the party has enjoyed since Kishida announced his departure and might continue to enjoy during the next leader’s honeymoon period.
Perhaps an advantage to parliamentary democracies, in which loyal service to the party is the only way to get ahead. In a federal, presidential democracy like the United States many candidates enter presidential primaries with their own bases of support and owe little if anything to their competitors.
The Constitutional Democratic Party campaign has not been much better, with the party’s candidates mostly taking turns attacking the LDP instead of each other.
I have watched a lot of the LDP’s events, and I am not certain I have heard any candidate discuss how they would manage the relationship with South Korea after Kishida’s efforts.
Ishiba with a broad, older reform-minded base outside the big cities, Koizumi among younger, urban and suburban voters, Takaichi with the more conservative supporters.