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Abe’s Uphill Struggle for Constitutional Revision

11/07/2016
japan, politics

In 2003, when US president George W. Bush and his advisors were preparing the case for invading Iraq, they announced to the world that they had assembled a “coalition of the willing” who backed military action against Saddam Hussein. The term has become widely reviled, as many of the countries in this supposed “coalition” had no skin in the game (some didn’t even have standing armies), and many were major recipients of US overseas aid. It was a rhetorical flourish, a salad garnish of modesty flimsily covering the dubious status of the invasion under actual international law.

Today, as Japan processes the results from yesterday’s House of Councillors election, there’s a similar phrase that’s doing the rounds; “like-minded parties”. The emerging narrative is that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has assembled a “coalition of the like-minded” – that through stitching together parties and independents in favour of revising Japan’s post-war constitution, he has finally found the two-thirds majorities he needs in both houses of parliament to proceed with that goal.

Abe, in common with many of the more hawkish members of the LDP, doesn’t like the post-war constitution much. He views it, not entirely unfairly, as a document written by Americans and imposed upon Japan. Its restrictions chafe at him, especially in terms of Japan’s ability to assert itself internationally, which is strictly limited by the pacifist Article 9. None of this is secret or hidden. The agenda of Abe and the LDP for constitutional reform is openly discussed. The party’s website even hosts a draft of the reformed constitution it would like to put in place.

Who else is in favour of constitutional revision? According to news agencies running with the “coalition of the like-minded” narrative, the parties in favour are the LDP, their coalition partners Komeito, Initiatives from Osaka (the latest incarnation of the burgeoning but chaotic Kansai-based political movement) and The Party for Japanese Kokoro (a mid-implosion right-wing fringe group founded by the now-retired Shintaro Ishihara). Added to a small number of LDP-leaning independents, this gives a two-thirds majority in both houses. This means that constitutional revision is supposedly on the table. Abe himself has already called for a debate on revision to commence.

The problem with this narrative is that it’s over-simplified to the point of dishonesty. Just as the Iraq War’s “coalition of the willing” included several countries whose “willingness” didn’t extend to any actual participation in conflict, Abe’s “coalition of the like-minded” includes some major groups whose thinking on constitutional revision is markedly different from his own. Primary among those is Komeito, whose inclusion in these lists of “pro-revision” parties is deeply questionable.

Komeito, the political offshoot of lay Buddhist organisation Soka Gakkai, is a socially conservative party whose domestic policies are a relatively comfortable fit for the LDP. The party’s views on international policy and military policy, however, depart radically from the LDP’s. Komeito inherits from Soka Gakkai a strong central pillar of pacifism. While it has been willing to bend its principles to some degree to maintain its mutually beneficial relationship with the LDP, Komeito’s leaders are conscious that its existence depends on the votes of Soka members. Straying too far from the organisation’s philosophy, to the extent of breaking its umbilical link with Soka, would result in the loss of the religious support base that is the party’s primary asset.

Komeito is, officially, in favour of constitutional revision – but there is an enormous gulf between the broad concept of “constitutional revision” and the rather narrower concept of “the constitutional revision which Shinzo Abe wants”. At a speech in Iwakura city in Aichi prefecture earlier this month, Komeito leader Natsuo Yamaguchi made perfectly clear, not for the first time, that his party has “fundamentally different thinking” to the LDP on areas of constitutional revision (「公明と自民で基本的に憲法改正に対する考え方が違っているところがある」). Yamaguchi also pointed out that the situation is more complex than “pro-revision” and “anti-revision”; Komeito is “pro-revision” but has its own agenda about what it would like to revise, while the Democratic Party, officially “anti-revision”, actually has members who strongly favour specific constitutional revisions. (Asahi Shimbun, 2016-07-05, 4総合、p.4)

“Constitutional revision”, in itself, is not necessarily a right-wing, conservative or militaristic objective. The Japanese constitution is a problematic document from many standpoints, and contains many contradictions. The question is what you’d like to revise. Plenty of progressives would like to revise Article 24, which defines marriage as between “both sexes” and seemingly prevents equal marriage from being adopted. Some legal scholars approve of changing Article 41 – which was intended to assert the primacy of the Diet over the Emperor, but has in practice been used to assert its primacy over the Supreme Court. Yet others suggest adding or amending articles to create rights and obligations related to environmental protection.

Including supporters of those changes -such as Komeito, which has hinted at approving of an environmental protection amendment – in the “coalition of the like-minded” is stretching the definition of “like-minded” past breaking point. The problem is that constitutional amendment, as a concept, is wielded by the media as a blunt object. NHK conducted an exit poll yesterday which asked whether voters thought that constitutional revision was necessary, concluding that 33% said “necessary”, 32% disagreed and 35% didn’t know – a major swing against “necessary” compared with the same exit poll in 2013’s election. The devil is in the lack of detail; NHK did not ask voters which part of the constitution they thought needed to be changed. Shorn of detail, the question is ridiculous. Walk into the street in any country with a clipboard and ask the question, “should we change the law”, declining to clarify which law you mean or how it would be changed, and you’ll collect lots of data to which precisely no meaning can be assigned.

The existence of this hypothetical “coalition of the like-minded”, then, is a fantasy. Until its members can agree on what to change and how, there is no coalition, and there are no “like minds”. Abe’s announcement that he wishes to start a discussion to that end is only the beginning of a long, difficult negotiation process whose outcome is far from certain – and Article 9, at least, is probably off the table entirely. Abe knows that Komeito remains a stumbling block to his constitutional ambitions. In TV interviews last night he alluded to the same point Yamaguchi made last week – that there are Democratic Party members in favour of reform. This implies that he knows he may have to lean on unlikely support in order to stitch together a two-thirds majority on any revision, and even then, it’s not going to be the sweeping revision he actually wants.

And all of that, of course, is just to pass the legislation required to hold a referendum – which will require the assent of the majority of the country’s voters to pass, and whose failure would likely cost Abe his political career. This election outcome is little more than a small, shuffling step on a long, steep road towards constitutional revision – and for all the talk of “like-minded parties”, it’s a road that Abe and his right-wing allies are still largely walking alone.

Japan’s Boring, Inconsequential Election

08/07/2016
japan, politics

Politics is boring, according to many of my friends and acquaintances. They will acknowledge that it is important and worthy of attention – if only to head off the impending argument implied by my skyrocketing eyebrows – but it’s boring. All that debate over minutiae, all that light and heat generated in passionate promotion or furious condemnation of subtle variations on essentially the same policies; all that time and effort, and so little, they say, truly changes in the end. It’s boring.

Ordinarily, I’m willing to argue against this point of view to its bitter end – and would point to the rise of demagogues like Donald Trump or the economic and social shocks currently wracking the United Kingdom as proof that politics not only matters, it’s also vital, interesting and capable of bringing about great change, not all of it positive. In the case of this weekend’s election in Japan, though, I’m willing to concede the point; this may well be the most genuinely boring election in a generation.

On Sunday, Japanese voters will go to the polls to elect half of the House of Councillors, the upper house of Japan’s bicameral system. 121 seats are up for grabs – 76 of them in First-Past-The-Post races in 45 constituencies around the country, and the remainder in a nationwide proportional election based on the party list system.

The posters are up, the candidates are busy making speeches outside supermarkets and bothering local residents by sending vans around to drone their names for 12 hours a day, and newspapers are printing their (deeply unreliable) polling forecasts – but there’s absolutely no excitement or interest around this election. Even TV news broadcasts are confining the upcoming election to the tail end of their reporting. The reason for that is simple; this House of Councillors election is almost entirely inconsequential for Japanese politics, and as a result it will almost certainly have the lowest turnout in Japanese postwar history.

In part that’s because House of Councillors elections are designed to be inconsequential. The House of Councillors itself is the less powerful of the two chambers (like the UK’s House of Lords, its main power is the ability to delay the adoption of legislation by forcing additional votes in the more powerful House of Representatives), and its elections are structured such that voters only get to vote in (or out) half of the chamber every three years. The councillors elected in 2013 are safe in their seats until 2019; those up for election this time around have been in office since 2010. This is a system explicitly designed to reduce voters’ ability to deliver a stinging mid-term rebuke to a government – the half of the chamber that’s not up for election effectively serves as a counterweight, preventing the balance of power from shifting too far in any given election.

Given the existence of that deliberate, structural effort to render House of Councillors elections somewhat irrelevant, what are the possible outcomes that voters might see from Sunday’s election? What’s the actual choice the Japanese electorate faces?

There are four scenarios that could result. The first is the most unlikely; the opposition parties could win 16 seats from the governing parties (the LDP and Komeito), recreating the “twisted Diet” scenario that hobbled the DPJ’s miserable last few years in government. In reality, they’d need significantly more than 16 seats, as some independents and smaller parties would likely vote with the government rather than with the motley alliance of the Democratic Party, the Communists and some smaller parties.

This scenario will not come to pass. Japanese election polling is not very reliable, but it’s all absolutely clear that the opposition will be losing, not gaining, seats in this election. If there’s been a huge polling miss – which is possible – then the opposition might pick up a small number of seats, but gaining enough to overturn the LDP’s hold on the upper house isn’t on the cards.

That brings us to the second scenario; the status quo. This would see the seat balance remaining much the same – the opposition might gain a few seats (but not as many as 16), or the LDP might gain a few (but not as many as 5, for reasons we’ll see in a moment), but essentially things would remain the same. The LDP would continue to hold the upper house with the support of Komeito. It would be a frustrating result for Prime Minister Abe in some regards, since he’d like to pursue a more aggressive policy approach that requires a larger single-party majority, but it would probably not lead to any major challenge to his leadership.

Scenario three is, in my view, by far the most likely; the LDP wins a number of seats, at least five, which gives them single-party control of the House of Councillors. The five seats which the LDP lacks in the House of Councillors is presently the only thing preventing them from governing the country as a single party (which they have not done since 1993); they have a large single-party majority in the House of Representatives already. In theory, a House of Councillors majority would allow them to dispense of their coalition with Komeito.

In practice, that’s unlikely to happen, because even if LDP politicians forget it sometimes, Komeito actually brings significantly more than votes in the House of Councillors to this relationship. Komeito supporters, largely drawn from the powerful lay Buddhist organisation Soka Gakkai, also generally vote for the LDP candidates in districts where Komeito candidates are not running (in return for which the LDP allows Komeito candidates to run without LDP opposition in a handful of districts). That’s a not insignificant number of votes – breaking up the coalition just because Komeito’s seats in parliament are no longer required would put a lot of LDP marginal seats at risk in future elections, especially if the spurned Komeito were to strike a similar deal with the Democratic Party (or whatever form the main opposition ends up taking after this election).

This outcome would leave Abe in a secure position, but wouldn’t make very much difference to policy-making – the LDP would still need Komeito for future elections, if not for parliamentary votes, and that would put a brake on any desires to promote a more radical policy agenda free of Komeito’s pacifist, centrist influence.

Then there’s the fourth and final possible outcome – the possibility that the LDP, alone or in concert with a number of like-minded parties, could get a two-thirds majority in the House of Councillors. That’s an important number, because in order to kick off the process of amending the Japanese Constitution (which has never been changed since it was adopted directly after the war), a two-thirds vote of both houses of parliament is required. In their attempts to make this election seem interesting, the media has focused on the possibility that a landslide for the LDP and for like-minded parties such Innovations From Osaka could give Abe the capacity to change Article 9 of the Constitution – the article in which Japan gives up the right to the use of military force.

For that to happen, the LDP and the minor parties which support such reform (which does not include Komeito) would need 162 seats in the House of Councillors. Right now, they’ve got perhaps 130 or 131, counting a handful of independents who’d probably swing in that direction. With insignificant parties like The Party For Japanese Kokoro (look, I don’t make up these names) unlikely to make any gains in this election, it would fall to the LDP and Initiatives from Osaka to make up 32 seats or more in this election.

Is that possible? Some of the polling says it’s actually probable, though that polling is somewhat suspect. The variable quality of Japanese election polling aside, this election has some specific aspects that are very hard to model – opposition parties are mostly running unified candidates in the single-member districts, for example, which will impact on voting in ways that are hard to forecast. Tactical voting on the split ballot is also tricky to account for. At best, I’d say that a two thirds “supermajority” of constitutional reform parties is not impossible, but it’s far from probable.

Even if it does happen, the outcome isn’t clear. It would clear one obstacle from the road to constitutional reform, but other barriers remain. For example, while Komeito and the LDP between them enjoy a two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives, Komeito is unlikely to vote for constitutional reform. Cobbling together a coalition to replace those votes would be extremely tricky, and would involve trying to convince some Democratic Party members to vote against their party line and in favour of the LDP’s reform bill. Even if that were done, and the bill passed with two thirds of both houses, all any such bill actually does is authorise a referendum – and convincing the Japanese people of the need to amend a constitution which is strongly supported by the majority of them will be difficult, if not impossible.

Hence, yes, this is a boring election. Even its most dramatic outcomes would only be technical steps paving the way towards possible future changes, and all of its most likely outcomes are no different to the status quo.

It didn’t necessarily have to be this way. The Japanese people remain deeply unimpressed with Abenomics, worried about nuclear power (though the salience of this issue has faded rapidly) and opposed to any move towards more overseas military engagement. In essence, the Japanese people oppose every major plank of the Abe administration’s platform – which should set the stage for an interesting, dramatic election.

The problem, as ever, is that a dramatic election requires a valid opposition – and the main Japanese opposition party, the Democratic Party, has failed miserably to deliver that. Its policy positions are unclear, its differentiation from the LDP’s platform is minimal and its leadership is confused and unimpressive. Its members spend their time scoring technical, political points, and failing to actually reach out to the Japanese electorate and explain why they’re worthy of holding government office, or how they would represent the interests of the people. When the Japanese people – or at least, the minority of them who will bother to vote – go to the polls on Sunday, they will not deliver a rebuke to Abe’s government, because no matter how much they dislike Abe or disapprove of his policies, none of them can see any alternative right now.

 

A Brief Thought on Nigel Farage

05/07/2016
politics, UK

Nigel Farage, by far the most extreme of the mainstream cheerleaders for Brexit and certainly the political leader most comfortable with brushing shoulders with actual racism and fascism in his utterances, has resigned from the leadership of UKIP, the United Kingdom Independence Party. In UKIP’s moment of triumph, pyrrhic though it may be, Farage has stepped down from the party with which he is synonymous. It’s the latest in a series of resignations and retreats which have claimed the man who called the referendum, David Cameron, the man who led the Conservatives campaigning to Leave, Boris Johnson, and now the man who led the only political party to campaign in its entirety for Leave.

Where will Farage go? With Farage having met with media baron Rupert Murdoch the day before his resignation, speculation has inevitably turned to the possibility that his incredibly high media profile over the past few years (far outstripping anything justified by UKIP’s actual political representation) will now translate into a media job. It would make sense in many ways. Farage is nothing if not intensely egotistical (he’s dramatically stepped down as UKIP leader in the past, only to return to the job within days) and it’s hard to imagine that at this, the moment of his triumph, he would disappear from public life. A media role would let him maintain his profile and do what he loves best – lobbing grenades from the sidelines as Britain’s political establishment tries to sort out the mess (whenever they stop making new messes and get around to actually sorting anything out).

Regardless of what Farage does next – and it is also possible (if a little out of character) that he’ll fade away for a little while to spend more time with his £80,000 MEP salary – he won’t be gone for long. His departure now is a calculated one. Unlike Boris Johnson, who never intended for a Leave victory and whose best-laid plans were thrown into disarray by it (and by Michael Gove stabbing him in the back), Farage likely believed that Leave could win the referendum all along. He’s got a plan, not for Brexit – nobody had a plan for Brexit – but for himself and his future career.

Farage is a rabble-rouser, and he knows that the rabble he has roused is going to stay roused. Brexit isn’t going to deliver what Leave voters want, not least because what many Leave voters actually want is impossible by any means short of a full embrace of fascist authoritarianism. Britain will muddle through somehow – economically and politically damaged, perhaps outside the EU, and perhaps with the UK no longer intact. Migrants will still be there, though. Businesses owned and staffed by non-white people will still be there. EU regulations will mostly still be there. The people who have been left behind by successive waves of neoliberal policymaking over the past 35 years will, if anything, be even worse off than before. Their vote to leave the EU won’t have changed their economic misery or removed the visible manifestations of the immigration which they blame for that misery. Their anger with politics, with governments, with elites and with all of the institutions which make up the British state will only intensify and curdle as they come around to the belief that the politicians have screwed them again. They voted to leave, and the politicians found a mealy-mouthed way to wriggle out of it. The people, the real people, the proper English people, spoke, and all those lying experts and self-serving intellectuals and greedy politicians just found a way to ignore it.

Nigel Farage will be right there to nod, to listen and to focus that outrage, fear and fury – just like he did prior to the referendum. He wants to be out of politics for now, because he doesn’t want to be seen to have anything to do with the stitch-up that’s inevitably coming. In his absence, UKIP will likely fall into a terminal decline. It’s never truly been more than the Nigel Farage Party, with other senior figures like Douglas Carswell and Neil Hamilton having none of his profile, his charisma, or his political nous. It doesn’t matter; UKIP was a vehicle and has served its purpose for now. Farage gets to play the tired, noble statesman who has achieved his purpose, slide out of politics (whether into the media or into temporary obscurity is a moot point) and ready himself to step back in down the line. He’ll be just as outraged as the Leave voters. He worked so hard for this result, to secure the UK’s independence, and those grasping, sleazy politicians in Westminster have undermined it all and ignored the voice of the real English people. He will be the perfect chalice to hold their anger, their frustration and their hate, and they will power him onwards to whatever his next political goal may be.

We’re not done with Nigel Farage. The people currently scorning him for running away from his responsibilities as the UK falls asunder aren’t the people who matter; they’ve never understood or been in thrall to the cult of Farage the Everyman, Farage the Proper Englishman, Farage Who Only Says What Everyone Is Thinking. Those who have believed in him this far won’t see his resignation now as any kind of cowardice or betrayal – hasn’t he earned a rest, after putting it to those smug Eurocrats and Westminster slimeballs for so long? – and will embrace him with open arms and ample spittle-flecked fury when he returns.

Needless to say, it’s not exactly reassuring that the politician who has most openly flirted with fascism is the only one who actually seems to have a game plan…

Labour’s Badly Planned, Graceless Coup

04/07/2016
politics, UK
1 Comment

The attempts of Labour’s parliamentary party to defenestrate their leader, Jeremy Corbyn, rumble on – but this coup has become an aimless, witless and utterly artless thing that threatens to damage the Labour Party far more than Corbyn’s leadership ever could. What began as a calculated and focused attempt to quickly remove Corbyn ahead of a likely 2016 General Election rapidly turned out to have no Plan B and no exit strategy. The party’s MPs now find themselves in a bitter and destructive struggle against their leader which threatens a complete implosion of the UK’s official opposition at one of the most crucial junctures in the nation’s political history.

I don’t think that Jeremy Corbyn is the right leader for the Labour party at this point in time. I think that many of the MPs who voted No Confidence in him last week did so in good faith – not from disloyalty or ambition, but from concern for the party and for those it represents. What has happened since the No Confidence vote, however, represents the most bone-headed act of self-destruction I think I’ve ever seen a political party commit.

Whatever your view of Corbyn’s leadership or his policies, the general sense of the man himself is that he’s a fundamentally decent guy – stubborn perhaps, even to the point of intransigence, but a decent human being nonetheless. It was this sense of being honest, decent and unpolished that led to his election in the first place. Years of slick candidates moulded by spin doctors to match target demographic preferences, yawning ideological emptiness concealed behind dazzling white smiles, left Labour supporters fatigued, disenchanted and desperate for something different. Corbyn doesn’t look like a modern political leader; he doesn’t talk like one; he doesn’t act like one. A bit frumpy, grizzled and utterly sincere, his appearances across the despatch box from former PR man David Cameron (a PR man being elevated to Prime Minister being the most worrying real-world instance of lunatics taking over an asylum that I can imagine) have only emphasised how different he is from everything else on offer.

Since Corbyn refused to step down following the vote of No Confidence, we’ve been presented with the gruesome spectacle of Labour MPs launching attacks on him in the press which have veered towards the intensely nasty and personal. There’s been a resurrection of the smear campaign attempting to link him to anti-semitism (he is a long-standing supporter of Palestine, a firmly mainstream political position in the UK and not one that implies any link to anti-semitism). There have been accusations that he is a bully, that he has ignored or sidelined MPs, that he runs some kind of “secret police” within the Labour party. There have even been claims that he might have voted Leave in the EU referendum or that he failed to campaign effectively for Remain. The former claim is baseless; the latter seems rather unfair given that Remain was ultimately supported by a larger proportion of Labour voters than even SNP voters. Corbyn is at heart suspicious of the EU – it has, after all, demonstrated radically neoliberal tendencies and its financial institutions in particular have supported brutally damaging, economically hawkish austerity policies. His speeches in support of the Remain campaign did take account of those concerns rather than being bombastically pro-Remain – but that’s exactly the sort of thing Corbyn’s supporters expect of him. Nuance rather than soundbite; honesty rather than spin.

Aside from the outright unpleasantness of resorting to (often anonymous) press attacks on Corbyn’s character when the main gambit of the coup had failed, these claims are politically naive to the point of astounding stupidity. They don’t make Corbyn look bad; to a public who generally see Corbyn as a nice, genuine old chap (if perhaps not a potential Prime Minister), they make him look embattled and set-upon, not by concerned Labour MPs but by bitter, grasping plotters. They make the Labour Party look like a nest of vipers, and nobody votes for nests of vipers.

Whether his MPs like him or not, whether they respect his leadership or not, Jeremy Corbyn is the most popular Labour politician in a generation. With Tony Blair’s reputation permanently ruined by the perception of gross dishonesty over the Iraq War, and Tony Benn sadly no longer with us, Corbyn is the closest thing Labour has right now to a populist figure. This is the second facet to the political stupidity of those continuing to push a coup against Corbyn; any future Labour leader needs Jeremy Corbyn on board. Any future leader will need Corbyn’s blessing, because they will need Corbyn’s movement – the tens if not hundreds of thousands of people who have joined Labour because of him. These people are the party’s best hope for being able to effectively run the kind of grass-roots campaign that might raise turnout and put them back in power some day. Labour’s MPs may not realise this, but local Labour parties who actually have to engage in on-the-ground campaigning do, and have overwhelmingly backed Corbyn. Unions recognise it too, and have also backed Corbyn. The MPs seem increasingly isolated.

The original coup plan wasn’t a bad one, and I maintain that many of the MPs who went along with it signed up in good faith. A vote of No Confidence would see Corbyn recognising that he no longer had the faith of the MPs he leads, and stepping down to make way for Tom Watson as interim leader and a new leadership election – which would hopefully deliver a unity candidate who could earn the support of both the parliamentary party and of Corbyn and his faction. Job done, Labour unified. The coup itself was planned because the alternative – a leadership challenge – would just see Corbyn’s huge grassroots support returning him to the leadership again. Thus, a way had to be found to get him to leave voluntarily, or at least with a semblance of voluntary choice.

That’s not what happened. Corbyn refused to step down – he’s stubborn, remember, that’s one of the qualities people elected him for in the first place – and while I personally think that was a mistake on his part, what followed after that from the most strident of Corbyn’s foes was not just a mistake, it was disgraceful and stupid. Labour’s MPs find themselves now in open, aggressive conflict with Labour’s most popular and well-liked political figure. Whatever electoral benefit might have followed from replacing Corbyn has been thrown away; by failing to back down from their failed coup, Labour’s MPs have dumped the party into a petty, nasty civil war, played out on a public stage in front of an electorate who need a competent opposition now more than ever.

Corbyn isn’t the right person to lead Labour today, but the coup has failed, and should have been abandoned the moment this became clear; if Labour MPs want Corbyn gone, they need to show the party membership a better alternative rather than trying quick and dirty measures to force a resignation. The only hope for the party is that those MPs who signed on to the No Confidence motion in genuinely good faith will reverse course before any further damage can be done. I remain hopeful that those MPs are in the majority. To believe otherwise would be to believe that 172 Labour MPs, the vast majority of the parliamentary party, are conniving traitors and schemers. Perhaps that’s true, but to believe so is to believe that the Labour party is utterly finished. I’d rather proceed on a somewhat more hopeful basis – an alternative to Labour will take many years to build, and many years without strong opposition to Conservative rule is not something Britain’s working classes or minority communities can contend with.

(Hat tip to @RichStanton, with whom a brief Twitter exchange helped to clarify my own thoughts on the coup and Corbyn’s position.)