Kishida offers himself to the ethics council

But he and the LDP continue to pay for the kickback scandal

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Prime Minister Kishida Fumio said Wednesday that he will attend a meeting of the House of Representatives’s Deliberative Council on Politics Ethics and, in his capacity as the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), address the corruption scandal roiling his party. It will be the first time a sitting prime minister has attended a meeting of the council.

“I feel a strong sense of crisis that if the present situation continues, trust in politics will be increasingly undermined and distrust will deepen,” he told reporters on 28 February. He added that he hopes all lawmakers will fulfill their duty to explain their actions in order to restore public trust in the political system.¹

Ethics council deadlock

Kishida was responding to a stalemate between the LDP and the opposition parties over how the deliberative council should conduct its hearings on the scandal. After the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP), the Japanese Communist Party (JCP), and Ishin no Kai submitted their request to the deliberative council on 13 February that the council meet with the leaders of the LDP’s Abe and Nikai faction in attendance, the LDP has been resisting the opposition’s demands for a more open hearing with a significant number of the lawmakers implicated in probes of the kickback scheme, including both the leaders of the implicated factions and the members who received the largest sums.

It took more than a week before the LDP communicated that Nishimura Yasutoshi and other Abe faction leaders would attend, and even then, the LDP tried to link the council meeting to the lower house’s passage of the FY2024 budget, which needs to be passed by 2 March to ensure that there are thirty days before the end of the fiscal year to guarantee its adoption before the new fiscal year.² The opposition parties, meanwhile, suggested that their support for allowing a vote on the budget to proceed would depend on the plans for the deliberative council.

Then, after agreeing that the council would meet on 28 and 29 February, the LDP insisted that the meeting be held entirely behind closed doors, with only council members in attendance; the opposition parties have demanded the sessions to be open, including live broadcasts. Izumi Kenta, CDP leader, offered a counter-proposal, suggesting that if the session is behind closed doors, then lawmakers should be subpoenaed, compelling them to respond truthfully to questioning. The LDP responded by suggesting the hearings could be open to all Diet members, and party leaders reaffirmed a tentative agreement that the hearings would be held on 28-29 February – but the opposition parties refused to yield on their demand for public hearings, and the council was forced to shelve plans to begin hearings on Wednesday.

Can Kishida cut the Gordian knot?

Thus Kishida finds himself stuck in the middle between the three opposition parties, who have virtually no incentive to concede on their demands for public hearings, and his own party, some of whose most senior members have a lot to lose from public hearings. Kishida, meanwhile, not only wants to neutralize the scandal – and perhaps turn it to his advantage – but also just wants to get his budget passed. The longer the council hearings are delayed, the harder it will be for the government to move the budget out of the budget committee and through the whole house by 2 March.

But at first glance it is unclear whether Kishida’s statement will resolve the situation, since the opposition parties were seeking public hearings with the LDP faction bosses responsible – not Kishida. Kishida did not – and, indeed, may not even be able to – offer up the heads of the Abe and Nikai factions for public hearings. The initial response of Azumi Jun, the CDP’s parliamentary affairs chief, was noncommittal, stating that he is not necessarily opposed to Kishida’s testimony, but Kishida himself is not the subject of the request for the hearings.

The opposition parties continue to have the upper hand. What reason do they have to yield? By insisting on public hearings, they can a) keep the kickback scandal at the forefront of the political agenda, b) deal a blow to the prime minister by delaying the passage of the budget, and c) hold out for a hearing format that could only harm the LDP. Thus, Kishida’s pronouncement is less about convincing the opposition to accept a public appearance by the prime minister himself than about pressuring his fellow party members to follow his example and drop their opposition to public hearings.

This issue is not only a millstone around Kishida’s neck – while his approval ratings have stabilized somewhat, they are hardly buoyant and his disapproval ratings are alarmingly high – but it is also dragging down the LDP’s support. In the latest Nikkei poll, the LDP’s support fell from 31% to 25%, and, when asked which party they support in the next general election, the LDP polled a mere 26% (down from 30%) to 12% for the CDP and 11% for Ishin. Public opinion is almost uniform in its disapproval of Kishida’s handling of the scandal, of the need for ethics council hearings, and of the need to punish LDP lawmakers suspected for violating campaign finance laws.³ A new Fuji News Network poll shows that 89% of respondents believe that the accused lawmakers themselves need to testify, including 81.3% of LDP supporters, 96.3% of Kōmeitō supporters, and 93.2% of CDP supporters. When asked who should be punished, 46.8% of LDP supporters said the faction leaders and 31.8% said all the suspected lawmakers; for the public as a whole, those figures are 34.4% and 55.2% respectively.

Kishida’s narrow road

If Kishida is to survive to fight for another term in September, he has to make a convincing display of cleaning house, put the scandal to rest, and hope that good economic news and some diplomatic achievements – a state visit to Washington in April, for example – allow him to make the case for his leadership again.

Thus far, however, his party is refusing to help Kishida. Their recalcitrance has been a gift to the opposition, shifting attention from better headlines (and jeopardizing the timely passage of the government’s budget) – and forcing the prime minister to offer himself up to the council – in order to protect the party’s compromised faction bosses. Kishida may want to restore trust in politics, and in doing so revive his fortunes, but he cannot do it without his party’s helps. And the LDP, at least its senior leaders, do not seem inclined to do so.

UPDATE

Within minutes of publishing this note, I saw a Nippon TV report stating that the five leaders of the Abe faction will accept public hearings in the ethics council.

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1. While both houses of the Diet have had standing Deliberative Councils on Politics Ethics dating back to 1985, the councils meet only in response to proposal calling for a hearing in response to suspected malfeasance by a legislator or legislators. The lower house’s council has held only nine hearings in its history; only the first, a hearing on Katō Kōichi in 1996, was completely closed to both lawmakers from outside the council and the general public. Of the other eight, not all have been televised, though some have, including a 2002 hearing on Tanaka Makiko’s misappropriation of salaries for her aides that was followed by her resignation from the Diet.

The council, by a supermajority vote of its members, can “recommend” punishments for lawmakers, ranging from temporary suspension to expulsion from the house, but it cannot compel these outcomes and has in fact never issued such recommendations.

2. Because, if the upper house does not adopt it within thirty days, the budget will pass automatically.

3. Respondents were not asked whether the hearings should be public.