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Japan votes in election seen as test for Democrats

11 July 2010 03:15 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Japanese voters cast ballots in a parliamentary election Sunday that is viewed as a test of confidence in the ruling Democrats’ 10 months in power, APA reports quoting The Associated Press.
Polls show that Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s party will likely lose seats in the 242-member upper house, where half the seats are up for grabs, partly because he has suggested that Japan needs to raise its sales tax in coming years as the country’s population ages and shrinks.
The vote won’t directly affect the ruling Democratic Party of Japan’s grip on power because it has a majority in the more powerful lower house. But a weak showing will undermine its ability to pass legislation and force it to find new coalition partners.
Kan’s Democrats swept to power last August, ending 55 years of nearly unbroken rule by the conservatives, promising to slash wasteful spending, rein in the bureaucrats’ power and bring more transparency to politics.
In their brief tenure so far, the Democrats have delivered mixed results.
They have put the brakes on many large public works projects considered wasteful, but their first prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, disappointed voters by breaking a campaign pledge to move a U.S. Marine base off the island of Okinawa and by getting mixed up in a funding scandal.
Kan, a plainspoken former finance minister with a grass-roots activist background, enjoyed an initial surge in approval ratings when he came to office just a month ago after Hatoyama quit.
Kan has argued that Japan needs to take aggressive steps to tackle its ballooning public debt. If it doesn’t, he has warned that the world’s No. 2 economy could face a Greece-like fiscal crisis â€” a comparison that experts say is a stretch because most government bonds are held by domestic investors unlikely to dump the securities.
But his suggestions that Japan should consider raising its sales tax from 5 percent to as high as 10 percent in coming years has dragged down his support ratings, possibly hurting his party’s chances in the election.
Over the last several days, Kan has toned down his tax talk, promising that the Democrats won’t raise the sales tax until after the next lower house elections, scheduled for three years from now, saying he wants to seek a public mandate for any decision. He has also spent more time talking about welfare and ways to promote economic growth.
"I promise I won’t touch the sales tax until the next lower house election," Kan said Saturday at a campaign rally in western Tokyo on behalf of a Democratic colleague.
"I propose a discussion with opposition parties to find ways to prevent Japan’s finances and social security from falling apart. That was my promise, so can I seek your support?" â€” to which he received applause from the crowd.
Kan has set a target of winning 54 of the seats at stake, the same number as the Democrats have now, but newspaper surveys suggest the party will more likely get about 50 seats.
The Democrats and their tiny coalition partner, the Peoples’ New Party, currently have a slim majority in the upper house with 122 seats.
The main opposition Liberal Democratic Party â€” a conservative party despite its name â€” is projected to pick up about five seats to bring their total to about 76.
The public’s interest in the elections has wavered as the campaign has coincided with the World Cup, where Japan’s team did better than expected, and a scandal that has hit the traditional sport of sumo wrestling.
Hiroshi Umezawa, a 60-year-old who listened to Kan on Saturday afternoon, said he was still uncertain whether he would vote for the Democrats because they had not lived up to expectations.
"A tax increase is probably inevitable, but I wonder if 10 percent is an appropriate figure," he said.
Still, Umezawa credited the Democrats for "bringing fresh air into politics" and said he was inclined to let them rule a little longer.