10/01/18 17:04:12
So long as the LDP had Koizumi around to offer the nation hope, it remained powerful. But once it lost its charismatic leader,
voters began to turn on it. “Simply put, Koizumi was morphine for the LDP. As long as he was there, things were OK,” says Naoto Nonaka,
a politics professor at Gakushuin Univ. “But once the morphine ran out, the LDP was back on its deathbed.”
Koizumi also weakened the LDP’s ability to recover. 0for all of criticism heaped on the fashion system,
it had been good at training freshman politicians for the rough-and-tumble of Japanese politics,
and proved effective at building consensus on policy within the party(fashion leaders would meet to hash out differences).
Shorn of that system- Koizumi weakened the group and discouraged new LDP members from them- the LDP no longer has an effective
bottom-up means for formulating and coordinating positions. This has left Koizumi’s successors unable to unify the rank and file and the bureaucracy on difficult issues, such as reducing wasteful spending for road construction.
Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda was forced to water down his attempt to do just that, and Aso managed to pass a $150 billion stimulus
this May only because of the extremity of the economic crisis.
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