The LDP's Long Goodbye

Posted October 19, 2009

When Yasuo Fukuda was elected president of the LDP and consequently prime minister of Japan in September 2007, his victory was seen as a triumph for the LDP’s factions. Mr. Fukuda rode to victory on the back of the factions, as he was endorsed by all but the faction led by his rival, Taro Aso. He was quick to reward his backers, naming faction leaders to critical cabinet and party leadership posts. While he retained 15 of 17 cabinet ministers from his predecessor’s second cabinet, his appointees to four party leadership posts—he created a fourth, election strategy chairman, so to include faction leader Makoto Koga—were all faction leaders, supposedly signaling that, in the words of one Daily Yomiuri headline, the faction bosses were in charge of the LDP again.

One year later, in the campaign to elect Mr. Fukuda’s replacement, at least four faction leaders broke with tradition and instructed their members to vote for whomever they prefer. The Machimura faction, the LDP’s largest and home to the past four prime ministers, was divided on which candidate to support, with Hidenao Nakagawa, a reformist and titular head of the faction backing faction member Yuriko Koike and Yoshiro Mori, the former prime minister and power behind in the throne in the Machimura faction backing Taro Aso. The faction’s members most likely voted for whomever they pleased.
 
Equally important, none of the five candidates ran as the candidate of a faction. While Mr. Aso is the head of a faction, the LDP’s third-smallest with twenty members, his faction seems little more than a convenient way to ensure that Mr. Aso had enough LDP members willing to endorse his candidacy—a candidate for the party presidency needs twenty endorsements to run. Propelling him to victory, however, was a cross-factional coalition of conservative ideologues, populists from stagnant rural areas, and party elders hoping to tap his considerable public appeal to reverse the LDP’s decline. Ms. Koike, his leading rival, is a member of the Machimura faction but as noted above lacks the support of the whole faction and ran as the candidate for structural reform, earning her the endorsement of Junichiro Koizumi. Also casting himself as a reform candidate was Nobuteru Ishihara, a member of the mid-sized Yamasaki faction, whose leader, Yamasaki Taku, has actually voiced his support for Mr. Aso. Shigeru Ishiba, the former defense minister, seemed to have little support but from his home prefecture of Tottori, Japan’s least populous, and is running a quixotic campaign based on the importance of a robust national security policy. Rounding out the five was Yosano Kaoru, who belongs to no faction and is arguably running as the candidate of the LDP’s fiscal reconstruction school.

The point is that the factions were irrelevant in determining who will lead the LDP into the next general election campaign, an election that could spell the end of the LDP’s dominance. The demise of the factions is not, however, the result of the events of the past year; in fact, last year’s reports of the return of the factions after having been dealt a blow by Mr. Koizumi were greatly exaggerated. The fact that the factions still exist may have more to do with inertia than with any role they play within the LDP.
 
Choosing prime ministers. The Machimura faction’s dominance of the premiership suggests that the old system of power sharing among factions has broken down. And in the 2001, 2006, and 2007 party elections, the Machimura faction’s clout has mattered less than other factors: Mr. Koizumi’s support among the LDP rank-and-file, Mr. Abe’s youthful appeal, Mr. Fukuda’s image as a conciliatory caretaker. The Machimura faction’s votes undoubtedly helped, but the election of the past three LDP prime ministers depended on more than mere numbers. Additionally, as is apparent in the recent LDP presidential campaign, the factions no longer control the votes of their members. This was apparent in 2007, when Mr. Aso received 132 votes in the parliamentary round, far in excess of what he would have received had LDP members listened to the instructions of their faction leaders. Not only that, as the power of the factions has declined, the power of prefectural chapters has grown, especially as they have opted to hold votes among party rank-and-file to determine how to allocate their three votes (the prefectural chapters get three votes apiece, totaling 141 nationwide. With the prefectural chapters increasingly using the popular vote—all 47 held popular votes before the Sept. 22 party election—they have clout disproportionate to their 141 votes, because they can single-handedly change an election. In 2007, had Mr. Aso won the voting among the prefectural chapters (it turned out that he actually won the popular vote even as he lost the prefectural vote 76 to 65), would the parliamentary party have chosen Mr. Fukuda upon the recommendation of the faction leaders?
 
Cabinet ministers. Recent prime ministers have formulated their cabinets for reasons other than factional balance: Mr. Koizumi opted for his ideological comrades, Mr. Abe opted for what the media derided as his “friends,” politicians loyal to Mr. Abe himself, and Mr. Fukuda opted for party stability in the wake of the 2007 upper house election, meaning that the senior status of his cabinet ministers was more important than the factions from which they came. Prime Minister Aso’s cabinet is consistent with this trend. Factional considerations appear to have had little to do with Mr. Aso’s choices. Mr. Aso gave important posts to his ideological comrades—most notably Nakagawa Shoichi, the new finance minister—and others who backed his candidacy, as well as two rival candidates, Mr. Yosano and Mr. Ishiba. Mr. Aso used his cabinet appointments to send a clear policy signal: the structural reformers clustered around Koizumi Junichiro will have no place in his government.
 
Policymaking. The factions have long since taken a back seat to LDP policymaking organs, the bureaucracy, and, more recently, the office of the prime minister in formulating policies. Mr. Aso will likely advance the process of strengthening the prime minister’s policymaking power.
 
Promoting future leaders. The LDP’s future leaders seem to benefit more from associating with senior members with whom they share a worldview or an ideology than with their faction leaders, and the mass media increasingly plays a role in grooming promising LDP members for prominence by inviting them to appear regularly on talk shows.
 
The factions appear to be giving way to a myriad of study groups, Diet members’ leagues, and other ideologically oriented party clubs of differing durability and power, as well as tradition LDP informal groups like the so-called policy tribes (the road tribe, the construction tribe, the agriculture tribe, etc.). The new groups include entities like the Club of 83, composed of reform-oriented Diet members elected by dint of Mr. Koizumi’s coattails, and the “True Conservative Policy Research Group,” a group led by Nakagawa Shoichi, chairman of the LDP’s Policy Affairs Research Council (PARC) under Mr. Abe and including Mr. Abe and Mr. Aso among its approximately eighty members. It is unclear what sway these new organizations have over their members, if any.

Accordingly, it is best to think of the contemporary LDP as divided not by faction or policy group, but by broad ideological “tendencies.” These tendencies include—being informal and lacking clear boundaries, this is a rough sketch—the conservative ideologues, centered in Mr. Nakagawa’s study group, a variety of Diet members’ leagues, and interspersed throughout the factions; the structural reformers who carry Mr. Koizumi’s torch and are now led by Hidenao Nakagawa (no relation), LDP secretary-general under Mr. Abe, whose school of thought is known as the “rising tide school” (because of the riding tide of growth that would be the product of the deregulatory reforms called for by Mr. Nakagawa); the fiscal reconstructionists, led by Kaoru Yosano and lacking broad popular appeal inside (although it can count on the support of the finance ministry); the old guard, including the various “tribesmen” who want to continue to use the government to provide pork and patronage to their constituents (they won a major victory in the spring in getting a new ten-year road construction plan into law); the liberals, few in number and led, insofar as they’re led, by Kato Koichi, a leader of the future who never panned out; and, perhaps the most numerous group of all, the risk-averse, those party members who if they are backbenchers worry most about the next election and if they are party elders worry most about ensuring the continuing dominance of the LDP.

For the moment, it is unclear which group is dominant. Mr. Koizumi and Mr. Abe each tried to claim the party for their group, and each ultimately failed; Mr. Fukuda, despite some reformist leanings, optimally relied on the support of the risk averse, many of whom ultimately found Mr. Fukuda too risky due to his dismal approval ratings. Mr. Aso’s cabinet appears to represent an emerging alliance between the ideological conservatives and the old guard, to the exclusion of the structural reformers. With Mr. Koizumi’s deciding to retire at the next general election, the question now is whether the structural reformers will stay in the LDP and continue to battle for supremacy or whether they will use the opportunity of Mr. Koizumi’s retirement to abandon the LDP and start their own party.

In the shift to ideological tendencies, the LDP has lost the coherence it had when it was primarily a union of factions all dedicated to the simple mission of keeping the LDP in power. Ideologues existed before, but with the factions increasingly irrelevant and policy increasingly more important than patronage, the LDP’s ideologues now have policy goals that are as important as the goal of keeping the LDP in power. Can the LDP last as a party pursuing several distinct and contradictory policy agendas? Will Mr. Aso or a future party leader be able to impose a uniform policy agenda on the party? Or will the next general election prove a catalyst for a party realignment that breaks up the LDP as it exists today?

Tobias Harris is a doctoral candidate in political science at MIT. He is the author of Observing Japan (www.observingjapan.com), a blog on Japanese politics.