Coalition of the Opposites

Hastened by abrupt political maneuver of dissolving the House of Representatives by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the opposite parties are making their utmost effort to regain power in the Diet. To avoid friendly shot each other in some election districts, Democratic Party of Japan, Japan Innovation Party and Your Party have got involved in discussion for their integrated candidates. Abe’s gamble for his ambition to obtain four more years may urge reform of other parties.

DPJ and Your Party embarked on official talk for merging both parties. President of DPJ, Banri Kaieda, and Presient of Your Party, Keiichiro Asao, met on Friday and basically agreed with cooperation for next election of the House of Representatives. It is reported that the talk was based on a possibility of integration of both parties, along with supporting each other in some districts and considering common campaign promises. The name of integrated party will be DPJ.

It is not surprising that both parties are integrated, because Your Party has a number of members who once affiliated to DPJ, except the founding leader Yoshimi Watanabe. Asao was known as an eloquent policy expert in DPJ, before he left the party with frustration on its election policy. Some leaders in Your Party said that they are looking for other participants of the coalition.

Innovation Party has partly the same structure as Your Party, which embraces a number of former DPJ legislators. They left DPJ because of their opposition to the party leadership, which was controlled by old-type leaders such as Ichiro Ozawa, Naoto Kan or Yukio Hatoyama. While the influence of those old names has been eliminated, it is a preferable time for those runaways to get back to the old home.

Joker is co-leader of Innovation Party and Mayor of Osaka, Toru Hashimoto. He has strongly been criticizing DPJ, denouncing it as one of the world old-interest groups. This novice politician has no idea for compromising to DPJ for his cause of reforming the country. Even though the party legislators consider campaign coalition with DPJ, he keeps on saying “I don’t like DPJ,” like a little kid.

It is unclear that the opposition parties can make a grand coalition enough for threatening the leading coalition by Liberal Democratic Party and Komeito. The fact is, however, that the share of the leading parties in the House of Representatives is far higher than actual electoral voters they had gained in last election. If the coalition of the opposite parties stands to some extent, it is likely that the leading parties will significantly lose their seats in the House. Then, Abe’s gamble will turn out to be failure.