Articoli e commenti del Wall Street Journal 050809
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Timore WSJ per possibile sconfitta LDP e vittoria Okada (Partito Democratico):
- Jap farebbe scelta asiatista, distanziandosi da alleanza USA
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Senato Jap ha bocciato, 125 vs 108, la riforma del sistema delle Poste (precedentemente approvata dalla Camera), causa la defezione di 27 deputati liberaldemocratici (LDP).
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Koizumi,stupendo alcuni, ha attuato la minaccia di sciogliere la Camera e indire nuove elezioni della Camera (non ha potere di sciogliere il Senato).
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Koizumi perseguiva da 20 anni la privatizzazione delle finanze postali, e ne aveva fatto il perno della politica economica del proprio governo.
- La banca delle Poste assorbe un terzo del risparmio del Jap e lo convoglia in titoli pubblici, finanziamenti di opere pubbliche, e di imprese spesso dissestate.
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Meccanismi controllati da sistema politico, partitico-burocratico.
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Economia Jap, anche se con spesa pubblica minore, è più centralizzata (più dirigismo statale) di USA ma anche della maggior parte di Europa.
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Sistema risparmi postali fu cruciale per finanziare ricostruzione postbellica, ma poi è divenuto un carrozzone clientelare.
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La privatizzazione avrebbe liberato queste enormi risorse per le imprese, e per investimenti all’estero, potenziando la capacità Jap di esportazione di capitali, avrebbe rafforzato Jap nella competizione finanziaria mondiale.
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Governo Koizumi aveva già ridotto gli investimenti pubblici dall’8% al 5% del PIL, e tagliato il Programma Fiscale di Investimenti e Prestiti, che utilizzava il risparmio postale, da 60 a 20 trilioni di yen tra 1998 e oggi, riduzione pari all’8% del PIL. Tale riduzione avrebbe già liberato parte delle risorse a favore delle imprese private.
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L’opposizione all’interno dell’LDP è dovuta a interessi clientelari, e anche al bacino elettorale dei 280 mila dipendenti delle Poste, contrari alla privatizzazione che avrebbe fatto perdere loro lo status di dipendenti pubblici.
- Ora è possibile una spaccatura nell’LDP, una sua sconfitta elettorale, una fase di empasse politica. Mercati hanno reagito con ribasso dello yen.
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Anche se Koizumi vince elezioni Camera, Senato resterà quello attuale fino al 2007. Tra gli obiettivi di Koizumi è anche la riforma degli altri istituti finanziari pubblici, e l’aumento dei ticket sanitari.
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Situazione Jap analoga a situazione Germania (riforma welfare e mercato lavoro). Schroeder come Koizumi battuti su riforme liberiste indicono nuove elezioni per settembre. Crisi del modello basato sul consenso, creato dopo sconfitta in 2^GM. Economie in crescita lenta.
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Ministro Istruzione Hirofumi Nakasone (figlio di Yasuhiro) ha votato contro la riforma. Ministro Agricoltura si era dimesso per protesta.
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Koizumi aveva rotto la tradizione del “manuale Cencelli” Jap, formando governo politicamente omogeneo.
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Possibilità che si avvantaggi il Partito Democratico (DPJ), che ha già avuto successo in ultime tornate elettorali. Il DPJ in politica interna porterebbe avanti riduzione spesa pubblica anche più drastica di quella realizzata da Koizumi, ma in politica estera il suo leader Katsuya Okada è per sganciamento da USA e avvicinamento a Cina e resto Asia: sua vittoria potrebbe comportare ritiro truppe da Iraq, e disallineamento da USA su Taiwan.
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“Se Koizumi non ottenesse abbastanza seggi alla Camera bassa… il mondo potrebbe vedere un Jap molto diverso”.
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Okada: truppe all’estero solo sotto egida ONU, relazioni con USA più bilanciate, riconsiderazione di basi USA “reliquie” della Guerra Fredda.
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Tesi WSJ (=minaccia USA):
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Con linea Koizumi “Jap giocherebbe ruolo politico mondiale commisurato con la sua potenza economica”, con linea Okada verrebbe “relegato a un ruolo regionale”.
Japan’s Leader Suffers Defeat in Privatization Push
TOKYO — The defeat of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s plan to privatize the $3 trillion postal system, which manages a quarter of Japan’s household financial assets, threw the nation’s political outlook into turmoil and underscored deep divisions over the direction its slow-growing economy should take.
The battle could split the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which has dominated politics here for a half-century, potentially spurring a realignment or setting Japan up for political gridlock, analysts said. Nearly two dozen rebels from Mr. Koizumi’s LDP Party joined the opposition bloc to stop Mr. Koizumi’s initiative in the Upper House.
Japan isn’t the only country undergoing a searing debate about how much to embrace free markets. Mr. Koizumi’s efforts hit a wall within the LDP less than three months after German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder faced similar difficulties. In Germany, traditional supporters deserted Mr. Schroeder’s Social Democrats after he pushed through an overhaul of Germany’s welfare systems and labor market. He is trying
to bring about an election next month.
Both countries are dealing with similar tough questions as they face a precarious future: how far to push free markets on aging economies that prize the consensus model created from the ashes of World War II defeat. Next year, 20% of Japan’s population will be over age 60, while Germany will reach that mark in 2009. Such large numbers of elderly place growing demands on the countries’ pension and health-care systems.
Moreover, both economies are expanding slowly. Though Japan is growing again after the doldrums of the 1990s, its economy is expanding only at an annual rate of about 2%, down from an average of 5% in the late 1980s. Germany has had two recessions in the past four years, while growth has been anemic; the government’s prediction for budget-planning purposes this year is 1%.
Yesterday, the International Monetary Fund said the near-term outlook for Japan’s economy is improving despite its slow underlying economic growth and aging population. But in its report, which was prepared on July 29, the IMF also praised the plan to revamp the postal system.
But it also appeared that some legislators were surprised by Mr. Koizumi’s decision to call for new elections — suggesting that many hadn’t believed he would carry out his threat to dissolve Parliament. Mr. Koizumi said he had called new elections so voters could decide whether postal overhaul is needed — and said he would resign if his party and its coalition can’t win a majority. "I will do my best to win the elections so that I can continue the reforms," he said.
Mr. Koizumi has been pushing for postal reform for two decades. Since he took power in April 2001, he has largely shunned the LDP’s tradition of doling out cabinet posts according to the strength of party factions, and instead picked ministers according to their policy stance and ability. He started warning last year that he would consider a vote against privatization as a vote of no confidence, implying that he would dissolve Parliament if this happened.
But the prime minister’s decision to use the political "nuclear option" carries big risks, especially for the LDP. The move could create a permanent rift in the party — already, Mr. Koizumi’s farm minister has resigned over the tactic — as well as trigger a change in government for the first time since a short break in LDP rule 12 years ago.
More broadly, a period of weak government could make it hard for Japan to carry out basic changes needed to cope with its aging society and growing national debt. Yesterday, some strategists were warning of a new dose of uncertainty for investors in Japan.
Mr. Koizumi’s strategy appears to be to call the bluff of LDP rebels, whom he argues are representing the narrow interests of postal workers and beneficiaries of the flow of Japan Post’s funds. The Japanese public as a whole seems to back his efforts, as reflected in his consistently high support ratings. In the coming election, for which campaigning begins on Aug. 30, the LDP plans to withhold endorsement from rebel lawmakers and appeal to the public to vote for LDP candidates who back the prime minister’s plans.I wonder whether the public will say ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ " Mr. Koizumi said at a news conference yesterday evening.
In the best scenario for Mr. Koizumi, a victory for his purged version of the LDP might eliminate many of the "old guard" who have dogged his four years in office. That would strengthen Mr. Koizumi in his campaign to overhaul the postal system, though this goal might be unrealistic in the short term, as the Upper House will remain with its current members until its next elections in 2007. Items still outstanding on his to-do list include shaking up other semigovernmental financial institutions and raising the charges paid by patients in the national medical insurance system.
At the same time, some voters say they are tiring of the prime minister and what critics call a domineering manner that is reflected in his move to dissolve Parliament.
Even if the ruling coalition failed to win a majority in the 480-seat Lower House and Mr. Koizumi resigns, his most likely successors at the party’s helm probably wouldn’t undo his biggest changes, such as reducing public spending, analysts said. But the successors lack his reformist zeal.
A different shake-up could be in order if the DPJ gains power. Like Mr. Koizumi, the DPJ wants to reduce wasteful public-works projects, such as road and bridge building. Moreover, analysts said, a DPJ victory might herald a new era where two large parties competed to run government, as in most industrialized countries. In Japan, the LDP has governed since 1955, with only one 11-month break in 1993 and 1994.
Because of that, some analysts think yesterday’s rejection could breathe new life into Japan, by encouraging more open debate and speedier change as rival parties compete to come up with the best policies. "This could be a critical first step toward the creation of a two-party system," said Kathy Matsui, a strategist at U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs. "This would allow [legislators] to move without as much compromise."
The Little ‘Henjin’ That Could?
August 9, 2005; Page A10
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has committed political hara kiri by staking his career on the postal-privatization bills that were defeated in the upper house of the Japanese parliament yesterday. His decision to dissolve the lower house and call a snap election marks the end of his ability to push a reformist agenda. Even if Mr. Koizumi defies the odds and manages to remain in office after the Sept. 11 polls, he will be reduced to a lame-duck leader.
That does not mean the end of reform in Japan. Indeed, Mr. Koizumi’s political "suicide" may well force fundamental political change with more competitive policy debate between Japan’s two major political parties poised to replace the Liberal Democratic Party’s two-generation long monopoly of power.
Yesterday’s vote marked the culmination of, and a bitter defeat for, Mr. Koizumi’s lifelong ambition to privatize Japan’s postal-savings system. Ever since the early 1990s, he has spoken out strongly on the need for postal-system reform in a way that is highly unusual in Japan — where politicians are rarely so vocal about one consistent theme. That’s one reason why he has been branded a henjin — "odd one" — by his political peers in the otherwise extremely conformist and rigid ruling Liberal Democratic Party.
In pursuing this goal, he has worked closely with Heizo Takenaka, the banking minister who first became an adviser to Mr. Koizumi back in the early 1990s. Together they sought a way for Japan to reinvent itself and stay a globally competitive powerhouse — looking to
America for inspiration, and adopting Ronald Reagan’s themes of reducing the size of government and freeing people from the burden of state control.
In their search for ways to foster new private-sector business opportunities and economic efficiencies, Messrs. Koizumi and Takenaka quickly focused on Japan’s unique system of financial socialism — which has the postal-savings and life-insurance system at its heart.
While Japan’s postal-savings system did contribute to the country’s extraordinary economic growth in the post-war catch-up period by providing long-term stable financing to rebuild the infrastructure of the shattered country, Messrs. Koizumi and Takenaka quickly saw that a mature, developed economy needed a different structure. Dismantling the postal-savings system would go a long way toward changing Japan’s fundamental money flow.
But changing the way money flows represents a major challenge to powerful vested interests, who thrive on the pork-barrel politics of the postal-savings system and the hundreds of thousands of jobs it provides. Not surprisingly, Mr. Koizumi’s insistence on postal liberalization meant that he was never going to be popular within his party. But that never stopped him from sticking to his conviction, as he showed by gambling his career on yesterday’s vote.
Japan’s constitution grants the prime minister only one key tool with which to exercise control over his parliamentary supporters — the power to dissolve the lower house of the Japanese parliament and call a fresh election at any time. That threat is normally enough to keep rank and file parliamentarians in line. After all, politicians are no different from most people — eager to hold on to their jobs, rather than have to fight for them over again. And getting elected is particularly hard work in today’s Japan. Both young and old voters have become increasingly disgruntled with the LDP’s old-style network politics and are casting around for an alternative.
The LDP’s relative decline in national and local voter fortunes was underscored in last year’s upper house elections and in July’s elections for the Tokyo assembly. On both occasions, opposition parties and especially the Democratic Party of Japan gained a substantial number of seats, leaving the LDP dependent on its coalition with the New Komei Party to remain in power.
It is a mark of how much of a menace postal privatization poses to vested interests that a threat which would normally have worked backfired so spectacularly yesterday, with so many members of the LDP joining forces with the opposition to vote down the privatization bills. Especially for members from rural constituencies, maintaining the support of postal workers — who benefit from the present system — is crucial to their electoral fortunes, and outweighs any consideration of the LDP’s fortunes as a whole.
For now, a period of political uncertainty will hang over Japan. However, unlike Japan’s many bouts with political instability in the past, corporate and financial Japan is in a much better position to continue its recovery. The corporate and financial sectors are much less dependent on government support and fiscal spending than at any time during the ’90s — since Mr. Koizumi has succeeded in cutting public investment to below 5% of GDP, down from more than 8% of GDP when he took office four years ago. He has also cut the Fiscal Investment and Loan Program — the budget that uses postal savings to fund public investments — to below 20 trillion yen in the current fiscal year, down from 60 trillion yen in 1998, a reduction equivalent to 8% of GDP.
Since Mr. Koizumi’s budget allocations have already significantly reduced pork-barrel and wasteful spending, this sharply reduced dependency on public funds greatly improves the chances that Japan’s economic recovery can continue through any political vacuum.
Many who know Mr. Koizumi have always felt a deep-rooted desire in the man to change fundamentally Japanese politics. Ultimately, it is not the postal system but Japanese politics as a whole that he wants to change. And by calling an early election, he may finally succeed in doing so — since the opposition democrats have a real chance of seizing power and finally bringing a two-party system to Japan.
A Clear Choice in Japan
Japan is experiencing political turmoil after yesterday’s dramatic events in which Parliament’s Upper House thwarted the government in a key vote and the prime minister, in response, dissolved the Diet. But at least voters heading into snap elections can’t complain that the main parties don’t offer separate choices in the direction they want to take the country.
The leader of the main opposition Democratic Party, Katsuya Okada, wants to put space between the U.S. and Japan and draw closer to China and the rest of Asia. Whereas Mr. Koizumi is clear about what economic policies he wants, Mr. Okada is hard to pin down, though he has questioned whether some of Mr. Koizumi’s reforms are necessary.
Japanese voters will make their choice in elections now expected on Sept. 11. The vote will turn largely on local issues. It was one such matter, whether to privatize the Postal Office’s unwieldy savings system, that spelled the end of the government.
Twenty two Upper House members from Mr. Koizumi’s LDP rebelled and voted against privatization, helping defeat the bills in that chamber 125-108. The prime minister then made good his threat to dissolve the Diet. The "rebels" were not the revolutionary types, but rather hidebound politicians afraid of losing support among postal workers and rural dwellers. Some postal workers might lose their jobs and privatization could mean fewer rural branches, the opponents to privatization charged.
This "local" matter has global implications, however. The bills defeated yesterday would have, in due time, created the world’s largest private bank. Despite more than a decade of economic doldrums, Japan remains the world’s second-largest economy, one that expends just under $40 billion annually in foreign direct investment (FDI). The more efficient reallocation of capital that would come with privatization would have benefited Japanese savers and added to the capital available for international investment.
Whether the mammoth postal system, with $3 trillion in assets, will remain a source of government waste and scandal will now depend on Japan’s voters. Though Mr. Koizumi could only dissolve the Diet and not the upper House of Councilors, a strong win for his LDP in the lower chamber might concentrate minds in the upper one.
Voters will at least not have to guess where Mr. Koizumi stands. After a string of grey prime ministers
who came and went without making much of a mark, Mr. Koizumi has been a vigorous advocate of reform. No wonder that in the four years he’s been in power, the longest since Yasuhiro Nakasone stepped down in 1987, he has enjoyed comparatively strong public support.
His attempt to end public spending on the postal system — in many ways the hallmark of his career — was in keeping with the rest of his economic mindset. Unlike many of his predecessors, Mr. Koizumi eschewed the siren call of Keynesianism as a way to get the economy going.
As Morgan Stanley Tokyo chief economist Robert Feldman said to us yesterday, the postal debate had been a "fight for the soul of the country. Is this a big-government country or a small-government country? Is it market-oriented or not?"
Abroad, Mr. Koizumi has been equally forthright. His 2003 decision to dispatch to Iraq non-combat troops from the Self-Defense Forces required special legislation in order to circumvent the post-war constitution, which not only abjures the sovereign right to wage war but even putting soldiers in harm’s way. Mr. Koizumi has tried to deal with the political limitations imposed by pacifism by introducing special legislation to permanently amend the constitution.
Those limitations have some importance because of the growing ambitions of China for influence over the region. When Mr. Koizumi joined the U.S. this spring in calling for a peaceful resolution of tensions over Taiwan, Beijing chose to regard it as a challenge. It had already reacted unfavorably to the dispatch of troops to Iraq. "Spontaneous" anti-Japanese riots broke out in the mainland, ostensibly because of anger about Mr. Koizumi’s visits to a shrine that honors war dead and over his attempt to have Japan become a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council.
Thus the choice is clear. One would see Japan increasingly playing a political world role commensurate with its economic might, the other would relegate it to a regional one. It will be up to the Japanese to decide.