Is an LDP-Kōmeitō breakup coming?
Their fraying ties are increasingly hard to hide
"A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn't supposed to say.” - Michael Kinsley
In a speech in Fukuoka on Sunday, 24 September, Asō Tarō, the notoriously gaffe-prone LDP vice president and former prime minister, said in a speech that during the debate in 2022 over the three national security documents that the leadership of junior coalition partner Kōmeitō and its backer in the religious movement Sōka Gakkai were a “cancer.” The party, Asō said, clung to the outdated notion of Japan’s “exclusively defense-oriented” defense policy and only reluctantly accepted the acquisition of counterstrike capabilities because they saw that Japan could become a battlefield “like Ukraine.”
Kōmeitō leader Yamaguchi Natsuo was restrained in his response, declining to comment when asked. Ishii Keiichi, the party’s secretary-general, was less restrained, accusing Asō of misrepresenting Kōmeitō’s position in the debate.
Either way, this dispute comes at a fraught moment for the quarter-century-old coalition. The two parties fell out earlier this year over which candidates to field in Tokyo’s newly created lower house districts, prompting Kōmeitō to announce it would withdraw its support for LDP candidates in Tokyo. This rift was patched up in late August, when the LDP agreed to back a Kōmeitō candidate in Tokyo’s twenty-ninth district and accepted that negotiations would continue regarding a second Kōmeitō candidate in a Tokyo single-member district.
Despite this compromise, clearly all is not well between the ruling parties. Of course, parts of the LDP have never been pleased with the coalition, an alliance of convenience between the nominally pacifist, centrist Kōmeitō and an LDP that has, over the lifetime of the coalition, become more uniformly right wing. Kōmeitō, for its part, has been all but explicit that, whatever its differences with the LDP, the coalition has enabled it to influence the policy agenda and serve as a “brake” (the party’s own phrase) on the LDP’s more radical impulses.
The Japanese political system is clearly in an increasingly fluid situation. The resurgence of Ishin no Kai; the aging of Kōmeitō’s base and the long-term decline in its vote share; the LDP’s flirtation with a coalition with the Democratic Party for the People (DPFP); the rudderlessness of the post-Abe LDP: all suggest that, even if a change of ruling party is not imminent, the stable LDP dominance that characterized the Abe years could be transitioning to something new and less predictable.
Against this backdrop, the LDP’s right wing may sense an opportunity to cast off a coalition partner they feel has overstayed its welcome. Perhaps Asō’s remarks are part of a “heighten the contradictions” gambit, seeking to goad Kōmeitō’s leaders – and, more importantly, Kōmeitō voters – into failing to turn up for LDP candidates in a general election, thereby undermining claims that the party’s machine is still delivering for the coalition.
The right-wing press would certainly be happy for Kōmeitō to leave in a huff. Sankei columnist Inui Masato not only endorsed Asō’s characterization but blasted Kōmeitō for its pro-China line. “There is no need to cling to government to the point of being called a ‘cancer,’ Mr. Yamaguchi,” Inui writes. “It might be good to join hands with the Constitutional Democratic Party and Japanese Communist Party, whose watchwords are ‘pro-China’ and ‘exclusively defense-oriented.’” The Kishida government’s decision to proceed with removing the former Unification Church’s tax-exempt status, a decision that could effectively kill the church in Japan, may similarly fuel right-wing attacks on the LDP’s coalition with Kōmeitō, as conservatives have argued that there is little difference between the church’s influence operations and the relationship between Sōka Gakkai and Kōmeitō and the latter’s attempts to shape national policy.1
Neither Asō nor Inui speak for the LDP as a whole. But Asō’s remarks are unlikely to be the last we hear of LDP members and their conservative allies outside the party questioning the value of the coalition. To be sure, the right wing’s agitation is no guarantee that the coalition is doomed. Both the LDP and Kōmeitō have repeatedly shown that they value power — the coalition would not have lasted nearly as long as it has without this shared sense of pragmatism — and for all the chatter about the LDP’s bringing the DPFP into a coalition, there is no reason to believe that the DPFP would be nearly as valuable a partner for the LDP as even a Kōmeitō whose electoral machine has lost some of its clout. But every election going forward will test the viability of their partnership, and, if Kōmeitō struggles to show its value, the time may come when the LDP may decide to try its luck on its own.
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In this June column, for example, right-wing pundit Sakurai Yoshiko notes their influence on Japan’s China policy.
I’m interested in your take on Hiyakuta Naoki’s new Conservative Party, and it’s impact on the LDP’s right wing base. I personally think a lot of people underestimates his name value as a best selling writer.
Intelligent and measured as usual. But you underrate the Ishin factor for both members of the coalition as both have the option of allying with it. I suspect LDP-Ishin coalition would see the latter destroyed given its reliance on floating voters who following the precedent of SP/Jiyuto in the 1990's would blame it for the LDP's failures. But it would give them a chance for national influence. Of course the fundamental contradiction of Ishin remains, its urban localist agenda and nationalist-populist agenda are at cross-purposes.