Word: ldp
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...After that electoral defeat, Koizumi signed up as an assistant to an LDP heavyweight, Takeo Fukuda. The job involved answering the phone, greeting guests, running errands and even dusting Fukuda's shoes. It was Koizumi's political boot camp. His antiestablishment streak developed under Fukuda, himself a bright, squeaky-clean policy wonk who frequently took on the LDP's most powerful clique, headed by Kakuei Tanaka and filled with politicians with cozy ties to special interest groups like construction bosses, farmers and war veterans. This is the faction most dependent on pork-barrel politics, campaign war chests and the obtaining...
...Being a maverick and an iconoclast in an ossified political culture helped Koizumi's career. But being a loner can be a huge handicap when you're trying to tear down that culture?and have powerful, entrenched forces fighting you every step of the way. The LDP conservatives, led by the formidable Ryutaro Hashiimoto, want no part of Koizumi's reform agenda and are determined to preserve the business-politics relationships the Prime Minister has sworn to destroy. They are waiting to pounce: at the first sign of vulnerability, they will surely come after Koizumi as they did with previous...
...What Koizumi needs to do is win himself some allies in parliament?from among younger LDP legislators, perhaps, or even from the opposition. He was smart to sign up the young, hard-charging Nobuteru Ishihara to head up administrative reform in his Cabinet, and there are dozens of other younger pols, inside and out of the LDP, that he would be wise to court. But his natural aloofness makes it hard for him to reach out. And the few friends he has in politics are more likely to get him into trouble than out of it. Koizumi is close...
...only call on former Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa. In 1993, Hosokawa was a proto-Koizumi: a young, telegenic maverick, who promised to mend Japan's then newly burst bubble economy and reform old-style politics. And yes, he too had a youthful, blow-dried haircut. Hosokawa bolted from the LDP, cobbled together a coalition and became Prime Minister with Koizumi-like approval ratings. True to his word, he opened the protected rice market and introduced campaign-finance reform. But a minor scandal and an unwieldy coalition deflated Hosokawa. Eight months later, he resigned...
...This master plan, if carried out to its logical conclusion, will yield a special bonus for Koizumi: it will end patronage politics, and effectively destroy the traditional LDP. That's exactly why the Old Guard will resist his reforms. It's a matter of survival. For now, they're playing their cards close to the chest. Their few attempts at publicly berating Koizumi have backfired; those who dared have been inundated with hate mail and nasty phone calls. Instead, they're poised to start chipping away at Koizumi's program. Already, the bureaucrats, many of them allied with the conservatives...