The Hindu : Koizumi re-elected party president

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Sep 21, 2003

International

International

Koizumi re-elected party president

By P. S. Suryanarayana

SINGAPORE Sept. 20. The Japanese Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, was today re-elected, by a convincing margin, to the post of President of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the dominant constituent of the country's governing coalition. He can now stay on as party leader until September 2006, and he is widely expected to call a snap general election later this year, ahead of the statutory deadline, so as to seek a fresh mandate from the people to carry on as Prime Minister with a "reform agenda''.

Mr. Koizumi won 399 votes, just over 60 per cent of the total of 657 cast, while his three challengers together polled 258. The ballots consisted of the votes of the LDP parliamentarians and the weighted preferences of the party's members in the prefecture-level primaries. Of the challengers, Shizuka Kamei, former Chairman of the LDP Policy Research Council, bagged 139 votes, while Takao Fujii, a former Transport Minister and an `autonomous' candidate of the LDP's main Hashimoto faction, secured 65, and Masahiko Komura, former Foreign Minister, got 54. Today's poll produced no political surprises whatsoever, and Mr. Koizumi lost no time thereafter to reaffirm his commitment to a structural reform of the troubled Japanese economy in line with his political manifesto which was not shared by his challengers and their supporters. He had won the party leadership for the first time in 2001, and also the prize post of Japan's Prime Minister that goes with that, on a political wave that was set off by his agenda of reforming the country's factions-based politics and fixing the systemic problems of an ailing economic superpower.

Following his re-election as party leader, Mr. Koizumi plans to put an end to the politics of "shadow shoguns'' or party bosses, a system whose origins are traced by external observers like Jacob M. Schlesinger and others to the reign of Kakuei Tanaka who had become Prime Minister in 1973.

It is against an overall historical background of party politics that Mr. Koizumi said today, soon after his re-election, that the latest poll was "a major turning point in the new era of the LDP''.

To translate this new momentum in the party into a political gain for the people, he now wanted to seek the "true mandate of the people''. By this, Mr. Koizumi made no secret of his plans for a snap parliamentary poll.

This aspect heightened the drama of his intended shake-up of the party leadership at other levels tomorrow and his move to announce a new Cabinet on Monday.

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