Back to the future
Back to the future
Noda Yoshihiko gives the CDP a choice
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Fifteen years ago today – 30 August 2009 – the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) won a historic general election victory, winning 308 seats in the House of Representatives to drive the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) from power.
Today, 30 August 2024, Noda Yoshihiko, the last of three DPJ prime ministers, the man who called the election that ushered the LDP back into power in 2012, announced that he would seek the leadership of the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP). The CDP, the spiritual successor to the DPJ, will hold its own leadership election on 23 September, and, if he is successful, Noda could soon be leading the CDP into a general election campaign against the LDP and its new leader.
For all the attention the LDP’s leadership election has commanded from the media and the public, the CDP’s own leadership election is at least as consequential, insofar as the party’s lawmakers and rank-and-file supporters will be choosing not only a face for the CDP, but a more fundamental identity for Japan’s leading opposition party.
The prospect of Noda’s return to the leadership could mean a fundamental transformation of the CDP. At its creation in 2017, the CDP tried to position itself as a more progressive opposition, proposing a vision of a more participatory, pluralistic democracy. Its manifesto in 2021, under the leadership of party founder Edano Yukio, perhaps the most progressive platform ever adopted by a mainstream Japanese party, with strong proposals on gender equality, multiculturalism, sexual orientation and gender identity, and climate and energy. The party has continued to follow a progressive, participatory vision under Edano’s successor, incumbent leader Izumi Kenta, as in its 2022 upper house manifesto.
Noda, by contrast, launched his leadership bid saying that to break the LDP’s majority, he wants to appeal to conservative voters who might be disappointed with the LDP. He said that if the CDP is unable to reach out to moderate conservatives – and work with other opposition parties, implying a conservative party like Nippon Ishin no Kai – it will not be able to take power. He also said he would end coordination with the Japanese Communist Party (JCP), pursued by both Edano and Izumi as they sought to reduce the number of districts in which CDP candidates would have to run against JCP candidates. It says a lot about how he is positioning himself that he cited the late Abe Shinzō’s encouragement that he would have another chance, an exchange recounted in his eulogy for Abe in 2022.
In short, under Noda, the CDP would look a lot more like the old DPJ, a big-tent party offering more of an echo than a choice, a more reform-oriented, less corrupt alternative to the LDP. Noda’s pitch to the CDP is that, having been a prime minister, a Noda-led CDP would be ready to govern on day one. He would be a familiar and steady presence, dispelling any question about the party’s fitness. Edano, who has launched his own bid to retake the leadership of the party he started, is similarly arguing that the CDP needs to have an experienced leader at the helm to make the case to voters that it is ready to govern, although he is still making a more centrist or center-left appeal, arguing that the CDP can supplant the LDP as a “national party” without shifting sharply to the right.
Both Noda and Edano are arguing that the DPJ’s history in power is less of a liability than an asset for the CDP, that voters are more likely to be impressed or reassured by their experience in high office than discouraged that the opposition continues to be led by figures who helped lead the DPJ in power more than a decade ago, a period of time that is not necessarily remembered fondly by most Japanese. Nevertheless, opinion polls by Yomiuri and Mainichi suggest that Noda or Edano could be poised to unseat Izumi, with Noda polling at 25% and 27% and Edano at 15% and 14% in Yomiuri and Mainichi respectively, compared with Izumi at 8% and 7% respectively. Whether this is the result of name recognition – both are probably better known than Izumi and other CDP contenders – or reflects a genuine preference for the DPJ-era veterans is a judgment that the CDP’s voters will have to make.
But there is reason to question whether turning back to either Noda or Edano is a wise choice for the CDP. The “Ishimaru shock,” when Ishimaru Shinji, a little-known mayor from a small town in Hiroshima prefecture surged past veteran opposition lawmaker Renhō, one of the stars of the DPJ administration, to finish second in the Tokyo gubernatorial election in July, at least suggests that the older generation of CDP leaders has little sway with younger voters. This reading of the Tokyo gubernatorial election suggests that to be a viable alternative for independent voters, the CDP cannot just be the “un-LDP.” It should offer something new and different from the status quo that energizes disaffected independent voters who have opted to stay home rather than vote. Bringing back an old DPJ-era leader would do little to reach independents. In this case, the CDP might do better to stick with Izumi, who at 50 is younger than both Noda and Edano and was not in high office under the DPJ and has been a competent if not necessarily inspiring leader, or another alternative like Mabuchi Sumio, who was in government under the DPJ (transport minister) but is not nearly as well known as Noda or Edano. CDP voters may have an even bolder option in Yoshida Harumi, a fifty-two-year-old first-term Diet member, who has said she wants to run to provide a younger, female perspective in the race and is trying to secure the necessary twenty endorsements. These choices would build on Edano’s and Izumi’s efforts to build an opposition party that has tried to offer something different to voters.
None of these options is guaranteed to improve the party’s chances of taking power. It may simply be that not enough time has passed for the electorate to feel comfortable with taking a chance on a change of ruling power, regardless of who is leading it. It won’t help that whoever wins the party’s leadership on 23 September will immediately be overshadowed by the climactic final days of the LDP’s race and the excitement of the elevation of a new prime minister, meaning that the political landscape could change dramatically days after the CDP picks its leader. Still, when the CDP’s lawmakers and rank-and-file members vote on 23 September – and really, it will ultimately come down to the lawmakers (CDP-nominated candidates), since they control the bulk of votes in both rounds – they will be asked to choose between two very different answers to the question of how the CDP can compete for power. To an even greater extent than the LDP voters, the CDP’s voters are being asked to choose between the familiar but uninspiring past or a new and uncertain future.