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Koizumi seeks to project reformer image

By P. S. Suryanarayana

SINGAPORE Sept. 14. The Japanese Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, has set a relatively unconventional tone for Liberal Democratic Party's presidential poll, slated for September 20. As the dominant constituent of the country's ruling coalition, the LDP presidency carries with it the prize post of Japan's Prime Minister in the present political milieu.

Mr. Koizumi has already blazed a new people-friendly trail by winning the party's top post in 2001 on the basis of a simple but profound pledge to reform the economic structure of Japan as also the political architecture of the LDP. Now, with the LDP still regarded as a conglomerate of factions in a state of unfinished transformation, he is seeking to play the maverick `reformer' once again and `destroy' the old style party politics. Given also the complex challenges of changing the very structure of Japan, which is seen by some external forces as a "fragile economic superpower'', his call for national-level reforms has not lost currency. The latest election campaign for the LDP presidency formally began across Japan on September 8, and a major opinion poll has already put Mr. Koizumi's chances of re-election at 81 per cent.

However, two new aspects of the latest poll procedures are likely to keep the eventual outcome in a state of political suspense. Two years ago, when Mr. Koizumi succeeded in fashioning a Clinton-style campaign of turning the focus on the national economy, the winner in each of the LDP primaries at the level of Japan's prefectures carried all the three votes that were assigned to each relevant primary insofar as the national-level party-poll was concerned. An aspect of political reform that has occurred now is that the winner of any given primary does not carry all the assigned votes, which are instead, distributed among the various contestants on the basis of their actual performances.

Another novel feature is that the ballots case in the LDP primaries at the prefectures will be counted only after the election gets completed and not earlier, as in the past. This procedure will deprive the LDP parliamentarians of their traditional chance to vote on the basis of the ballot trends in the primaries. While these two new procedures have reinforced the secrecy of the LDP presidential poll, the political mystique of Mr. Koizumi's campaign is heightened by his sustained efforts to mould the country's politics as definitively as MacArthur had shaped the post-imperial Japan's Constitution in a different era.

A question that could become relevant only after the current LDP poll process is whether the Koizumi effect will match or eclipse the MacArthur effect.

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