First Past the Post: December 18

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East and South Asia

The second round of Gujarat’s regional elections finished Monday, with exit polls showing victory for longtime BJP chief minister Narendra Modi.

The late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s embalmed body has been unveiled (see above).

Congress in the Philippines approves a key contraception bill.

Negative campaigning a day before South Korea’s presidential election.

Lee Jung-hee, a minor South Korean presidential candidate, dropped out of the race Sunday.

One-time presidential contender Ahn Cheol-soo will leave for the United States immediately after South Korea’s vote Wednesday.

South Korea presidential candidates Moon Jae-in and Park Guen-hye faced off in a final debate Sunday.

Indonesia raises the minimum wage.

Indonesia considers the 2014 presidential election.

North America

U.S. senator John Kerry of Massachusetts seems set to be nominated to be U.S. secretary of state.

In Québec, the governing Parti québécois retains a narrow polling lead.

Puerto Rico’s credit rating was downgraded to just above junk status last Thursday by Moody’s.

Potential U.S. secretary of state and former U.S. senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska is not so popular in Israel.

U.S. senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, who is popular in Japan as the first Japanese-American senator, has died at age 88.

Latin America / Caribbean

A setback for Venezuela’s opposition in Sunday regional gubernatorial elections.

Henrique Capriles, who won reelection as governor of Miranda state, remains the top opposition leader in Venezuela.

Africa

South Africa’s president Jacob Zuma appears to have beaten back a challenge to his leadership of the African National Congress.

Kenya’s Jubilee Alliance determines a new way to pick a presidential candidate for March elections.

Ghana’s failed presidential candidate Nana Akufo-Addo will lead his party’s challenge of fraud in their case to the Supreme Court.

Ongoing struggle within Zambia’s ruling Patriotic Front.

Europe

A new vote will be held in September 2013 to determine whether Jean-François Copé or François Fillon will lead France’s center-right Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP, Union for a popular movement).

Romanian president Traian Băsescu formally nominated Victor Ponta as prime minister.

Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny will not join his followers’ new party.

Catching up with newly re-installed Ukrainian prime minister Mykola Azarov.

UK prime minister David Cameron can imagine withdrawal from the European Union.

Dutch finance minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem now seems the favorite to succeed Luxembourg prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker as head of the eurozone finance ministers group.

Middle East

Hesham Sallam on why Egypt’s president Mohammed Morsi is past the point of return.

Egypt’s State Council refuses to monitor the second round on December 22.

Foreign Policy interviews Mohamed ElBaradei.

Former Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri attacked Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah.

Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan attacked the concept of separation of powers.

Twelve considerations upon the DPJ wipeout in Japan’s legislative elections

Japan

Well, that was quite a blowout.  Just a little more than three years after winning power for the first time in Japan, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ, or 民主党, Minshutō) was reduced to just 57 seats in a stunning rebuke in Sunday’s Japanese parliamentary elections.

Japan

Shinzō Abe (安倍 晋三), former prime minister from 2006 to 2007, will return as prime minister of Japan, and the  Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP, or 自由民主党, Jiyū-Minshutō), which controlled the House of Representatives, the lower house of Japan’s parliament, the Diet, for 54 years until the DPJ’s win in 2009, has seen its best election result since the early 1990s, with 294 seats.  Among the 300 seats determined in direct local constituency votes, the LDP won fully 237 to just 27 for the DPJ.  An additional 180 seats were determined by a proportional representation block-voting system, and the LDP won that vote as well:

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In contrast, the DPJ has fallen from 230 seats to 57 seats — by the far the worst result since it was created nearly two decades ago.  Its previous worst result was after the 2005 elections, when the popular reformist LDP prime minister Junichiro Koizumi (小泉 純一郎) won an overwhelming victory in his quest for a mandate to reorganize and privatize the bloated Japanese post office (a large public-sector behemoth that served as Japan’s largest employer and largest savings bank).

Outgoing prime minister Yoshihiko Noda (野田 佳彦) has already resigned as the DPJ leader, and a new leader is expected to be selected before the new government appears set to take office on December 26.

The result leaves Abe with the largest LDP majority in over two decades — together with its ally, the Buddhist, conservative New Kōmeitō (公明党, Shin Kōmeitō), led by Natsuo Yamaguchi (山口 那津男), which increased its number of seats by 10 to 31, Abe will command over two-thirds of the House of Representatives, thereby allowing him to push through legislation, notwithstanding the veto of the Diet’s upper chamber, the House of Councillors.

It’s a sea change for Japan’s government, and we’ll all be watching the consequences of Sunday’s election for weeks, months and probably years to come.  Just a full working day after the election, events in Japan’s politics are moving at breakneck speed.

For now, however, here are 12 of the top takeaway points from Sunday’s election: Continue reading Twelve considerations upon the DPJ wipeout in Japan’s legislative elections

Japan votes today

It’s been an exciting weekend, what with the first round of the Egyptian referendum on its hastily-approved constitution (I’ll have some thoughts on that later — tech issues have kept the blog down earlier today) and Venezuelan regional elections, including key gubernatorial elections, not to mention the leadership race (likely to be won by South Africa’s president Jacob Zuma) at the conference of South Africa’s governing African National Congress. Japan

The big story in world politics today, however, is Japan, where today’s election could mean a drastic change in government for Japan and its nearly 128 million citizens.

Japanese voters are already, in fact, at the polls to select the members of the 480-seat House of Representatives, the lower house of the Diet, Japan’s parliament, in an election that seems set to return former Japanese prime minister Shinzō Abe (安倍 晋三) and the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP, or 自由民主党, Jiyū-Minshutō) back to power.

Abe, who served for exactly one year from 2006 to 2007, has promised an aggressive fiscal spending push as well as an expansive monetary policy, as well as a more aggressive approach to Japan’s military capability.  The LDP lost control of the Japanese government, for the first time since 1955, in the previous 2009 election, when Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ, or 民主党, Minshutō) came to power.

The DPJ, which has gone through three governments of its own, has been beleaguered by Japan’s continued economic malaise, a nuclear energy crisis that stemmed from a meltdown at the Fukushima power plant following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, a less-than-popular push to raise Japan’s consumption tax from 5% to 10% (approved just earlier this year), disappointment over the DPJ’s inability to keep a campaign promise to move the U.S. naval base at Okinawa and a recent diplomatic crisis with China over the Senkaku islands.  The DPJ has also suffered from its inability to stem corruption  within Japan and disappointment over its inability to transform the sclerotic nature of Japanese politics.

What can the internal gun politics of other countries teach the United States?

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Certainly, today’s sad news from Newtown, Connecticut — the site of a gun massacre that left, so far, 18 children and nine adults dead, will once again ignite a debate over the proper role of gun laws in the United States. USflag

The reality is that, despite the efforts of officials such as New York mayor Michael Bloomberg (pictured above) in favor of stricter gun control, after the horrific headlines fade, Newtown will join a growing pile of similar incidents — Columbine in 1999, Virginia Tech in 2007, Aurora just earlier this summer — each one more numbing than the last, with no appreciable change to U.S. federal policy on firearm control.  The last major effort was the federal assault weapons ban prohibiting certain kinds of semi-automatic weapons, in effect from 1994 to 2004.  The ban hasn’t been subsequently renewed, not even in 2009 and 2010 when the relatively pro-gun control Democratic Party controlled Congress and the White House.

But the fact remains that the United States has one of the world’s highest firearm-related death rates in the world at 9 persons per 100,000 annually, which puts it in company with South Africa, the Philippines and Mexico.  The United Kingdom’s rate, by contrast, is 0.22.  That, Americans should agree, is a problem, although Americans remain split over gun control laws — even after the Aurora shooting, 50% of Americans said in an August CNN poll that they oppose significantly more restrictions on gun ownership.

The Second Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights ratified in 1791, is a one-sentence guarantee to the right to bear arms:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The amendment is informed by the precedent of the English Bill of Rights of 1689 that protected the right of Protestants against disarmament by the English monarch (at the time, the Catholic James II).

Since that time, the American devotion to the right to bear arms has become a peculiarly American sensibility, especially since the 1980s saw a rise in pro-gun activism among the American right and especially within the Republican Party — the National Rifle Association is now one of the most powerful interest groups in U.S. politics (as recently as 1969, the NRA was so relatively weak that Republican U.S president Richard Nixon disavowed an ‘honorary life membership’).

In recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court has strengthened Second Amendment rights.  In 2008, the Supreme Court in its landmark District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment extends to the right to possess firearms for self-defense within the home, and in 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in McDonald v. Chicago that the Second Amendment is ‘incorporated’ by the 14th Amendment to extend not only federally but within the individual states.

Despite the efforts of officials like Bloomberg, who have argued that, at minimum, the federal government should tighten up and enforce loopholes in existing gun laws, just today, Michigan governor Rick Snyder was set to sign into law a bill that would allow concealed weapons in gun-free zones.

Indeed, most pro-gun advocates argue that concealed-carry laws — allowing anyone to carry concealed weapons — provide disincentives to potential gunmen.  Such state-level concealed-carry laws have become increasingly popular since the 1990s, and the vast majority of U.S. states now feature some form of concealed-carry permit law.  Pro-gun advocates also argue that free-gun zone laws that designate schools, hospitals and other areas as firearm-free have inadvertently made those areas ever more tantalizing targets for would-be assailants.

But certainly there are lessons from gun policy in countries outside the United States that can inform a reasoned statistics-based policy debate in the United States, right? Maybe not.

What’s most astonishing is that throughout the world, even among the closest U.S. allies, gun control remains relatively uncontroversial.  That makes the example of other countries fairly inapposite.

The general trend seems to be that in countries with relatively stricter gun laws, gun-related homicides are relatively lower, but pro-gun advocates note that there are essentially too many other cultural and political factors about the United States and crime in the United States to draw a straightforward line between the two.  As Ezra Klein noted earlier this year, the United States –and the U.S. south where pro-gun sentiment runs strong — is generally a more violent place than much of the rest of the developed world, generally (with or without guns).

The other trend worth noting is that many countries have adopted stricter gun laws in the wake of a horrific shooting spree or gun violence incident, but despite a worrying proliferation of such mass shootings in the United States, such incidents have failed to dent a political consensus against major gun control reforms.

In the United Kingdom, the closest thing to a ‘pro-gun’ position is the silly House of Lords showdown with Tony Blair’s government in the early 2000s over the 2004 ban on hunting with dogs — the hopeless cause of a fox-hunting aristocracy that was more about farce than force.  Otherwise, the United Kingdom has some of the world’s most rigorous anti-gun laws — if you want to own a firearm in the United Kingdom, you need to be prepared for a lengthy and bureaucratic process during which police determine whether you’re fit to own a weapon, and once you’ve obtained a permit, it can be easily revoked by the police.  Continue reading What can the internal gun politics of other countries teach the United States?

Lieberman resignation complicates Netanyahu coalition’s election chances

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That Israel’s hard-line foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman will resign following indictments Thursday for breach of trust doesn’t mean he’s leaving politics.

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To the contrary, Lieberman’s move seems calculated to allow him to return to the forefront of Israel’s coalition government, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, upon the strong likelihood that Netanyahu emerges from upcoming elections as prime minister.  Given that Israel’s essentially in campaign season, Lieberman (pictured above) is moving aggressively — and wisely, probably — to lift his parliamentary immunity in order to bring investigations to resolution as fast as possible about the charges that remain.

Those charges, by the way, are only derivative of the main charges against Lieberman that stem from a 12-year investigation with respect to money laundering and fraud — Lieberman stood accused of receiving millions from international businessmen while he was serving in office.  Israel’s attorney general Yehuda Weinstein determined not to pursue charges against him on those accusations.  The remaining charge is that Lieberman breached public trust by appointing Ze’ev Ben Aryeh as ambassador to Belarus without disclosing that Ben Aryeh had alerted Lieberman that he was being investigated by Belorussian authorities.  So all things considered, Thursday was somewhat of a victory for Lieberman in that it lifted a decade-long shadow from his public life.

Netanyahu is holding Lieberman’s portfolio ‘in trust’ and will serve simultaneously as prime minister and foreign minister until the January 22 elections for the Knesset (הכנסת), Israel’s 120-seat unicameral parliament.

In advance of the election, Netanyahu had teamed up with Lieberman to merge Israel’s longstanding center-right party Likud (הַלִּכּוּד‎, ‘The Consolidation’) with Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu (ישראל ביתנו‎, ‘Israel is Our Home’).  At the last election, Yisrael Beiteinu, with a strongly nationalist secular profile that appeals to many of Israel’s ethnic Russian Jewish population, won 15 seats to 27 for Likud, and 28 for the more centrist — and now-imploding — Kadima (קדימה, Forward).  The coalition between Netanyahu and Lieberman has remained the core of Israel’s government since 2009, and their combined ‘Likud Beiteinu’ ticket ensures that Lieberman and his allies will take at least 15 seats if the coalition retains its combined 42 Knesset seats.

The news threatens to sidetrack Lieberman less than a month after Netanyahu’s defense minister and former prime minister Ehud Barak said he wouldn’t stand for election in the Knesset, just two years after leaving Israel’s longstanding center-left party, Labor (מפלגת העבודה הישראלית) to found his own breakaway party, ‘Independence’ (סיעת העצמאות).  Netanyahu could still, however, re-appoint Barak as a non-MK defense minister after the election.

But despite the conventional wisdom that Netanyahu will easily glide to reelection, things are looking decidedly less secure for him in the wake of a number of disappointments for his government — Netanyahu was widely seen to have publicly challenged U.S. president Barack Obama over Iran and also to have favored Republican candidate Mitt Romney in the U.S. presidential election, so Obama’s reelection was widely seen as a setback for Netanyahu.

Furthermore, the eight-day bombing campaign in Gaza in November, the United Nations vote on Nov. 30 to recognize Palestine as a non-member observer state and the Israeli announcement of further settlements in the West Bank have called into question Netanyahu’s sincerity on achieving Israeli-Palestinian peace, but his diplomatic abilities as well, given Israel’s increasingly negative image in the world.  Those defeats came after Netanyahu’s cartoonish Cassandra siren demanding ‘red lines’ with regard to Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.

Those troubles are borne out in a poll released today — conducted before Lieberman’s resignation — that finds ‘Likud Beiteinu’ would win just 37 seats in the election, a bit of a retreat from their current 42 seats.  In the poll, 54% of Israeli voters say that Israel’s diplomatic position has gotten worse in the past four years, at a time when Israeli diplomacy will remain vital throughout the Middle East in 2013 and beyond — on Egypt, on Palestine, on Syria and Lebanon and on Iran.

But Likud Beiteinu’s loss — so far — has not meant a gain for the forces of Israel’s horribly fractured center-left.  Instead, the even more stridently Zionist, conservative Bayit Yehudi (הבית היהודי, ‘The Jewish Home’) would win 16 seats, up from just three in the current Knesset.

That party — or rather coalition of parties — is led by Naftali Bennett, who served as Netanyahu’s chief of staff in opposition from 2006 to 2008, and it has been a component, albeit a small component, of Netanyahu’s coalition, and could be expected to join future Netanyahu-led coalitions as well.  Bennett is rapidly becoming a rising star in Israel, and he’ll be headed for a major cabinet post if he places third — or higher — in January’s elections.  Bennett, born to American parents and a former New York City resident, founded and sold a company in his 20s to become independently wealthy before returning to Israel, serving in the Israeli Defense Force during the short-lived 2006 war in Lebanon and then in politics as Netanyahu’s chief of staff.

For now, then, while Lieberman’s troubles could result in harming Lieberman’s reputation, it shouldn’t affect Netanyahu’s position to remain prime minister — though a stronger Jewish Home bloc in the Knesset would arguably make a future Netanyahu government more Zionist in nature and less secular.

The poll showed that the center-left, currently fragmented among three major groups, would win just 36 seats total, meaning that, even if a world where the three parties could unite somehow, they still don’t command enough support to form a government:  Continue reading Lieberman resignation complicates Netanyahu coalition’s election chances

First Past the Post: December 14

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East and South Asia

Moon Jae-in is tightening the gap with Park Guen-hye in the final polls before the Dec. 19 vote.

Japanese prime minister Yoshihiko Noda hasn’t had such amazingly great luck.

Asahi Shimbun profiles Shinzo Abe.

Former Thai prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has been charged with murder.

Gujarat’s voters went to the polls in the first of two rounds of voting on Thursday.

North America

Susan Rice withdraws from consideration as a candidate for U.S. secretary of state.

Latin America / Caribbean

Cayman premier McKenna Bush won’t resign.

Which Caribbean country is set for the highest GDP growth estimates in 2013?

Argentina agrees to largest bondholder payout since 2001.

Africa

Kgalema Motlanthe is challenging Jacob Zuma for the leadership of the African National Congress in South Africa.

More on Egyptian and Sudanese tensions over Ethiopia’s planned Blue Nile dam.

The NPP will challenge the NPC’s win in Ghana’s presidential race, but will respect the Ghanaian Supreme Court’s ruling.

Uhuru Kenyatta and Musalia Mudavadi are battling for the presidential nomination of Kenya’s Jubilee coalition.

Europe

The United Kingdom’s AAA debt rating may be downgraded.

Europe moves toward a banking union.

Silvio Berlusconi might not run for prime minister again in Italy if current technocratic prime minister Mario Monti runs. But who knows? [Italian]

Ukraine’s parliamentarians brawl (literally — see photo above).

A Bulgarian view on the Romanian election.

Jean-François Copé and François Fillon are still dividing the center-right UMP in France. [French]

Middle East

Foreign Policy considers a post-Abbas West Bank.

Lebanon’s prime minister Najib Mikati offers to step down in exchange for election law reform from the March 14 coalition.

Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman was charged with fraud and breach of public trust.

New Republic profiles Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi.

 

With Chávez’s health in doubt, regional Venezuelan elections assume greater importance

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With Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez recovering from surgery, due to what may be terminal cancer, it’s easy to forget that this weekend will mark a handful of key regional races throughout Venezuela, including a gubernatorial race in Miranda state that pits Chávez’s former presidential rival against Chávez’s former vice president.zuliamiranda flagVenezuela Flag Icon

Although the attention this week has been mostly on Chávez’s health, his departure to Cuba for surgery and, perhaps above all, his speech last Saturday night indicating that his preferred successor is former foreign minister and vice president Nicolás Maduro, the results of Sunday’s races will establish the backdrop for the leading figures of both Chávez’s Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV, or United Socialist Party of Venezuela) and the broad opposition coalition, the Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD).

Indeed, with rumors flying of complications after his surgery, the weekend’s races have counterintuitively become more important as Venezuela prepares for the possibility, at least, of a new early presidential election if Chávez resigns or dies in office.

In their own right, however, because 20% of the federal budget is (theoretically) allotted to state governments, governorships provide the MUD and other opposition candidates a platform for government, notwithstanding the centralization of Venezuela’s federal system under PSUV rule.

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The key race that everyone will be watching is the governor’s race in Miranda, where the incumbent, Henrique Capriles, recently finished his unsuccessful presidential campaign against Chávez as the MUD’s standard-bearer — although he lost by 9 points, Capriles won 45% of the vote, making him Chávez’s most successful political opponent in his 13-year reign.  Miranda state is likely Venezuela’s most developed state and its second most populous, bordering (and in some cases including) the broad Caracas metropolitan area.  Chávez actually won this state in the October presidential race by a squeaker — with 49.96% to Capriles’s 49.52%, and Capriles won the 2008 election with just over 52% of the vote.

His opponent is the somewhat humorless former vice president, Elias Jaua, and although one poll has shown Jaua with a five-point lead against Capriles, other polls have shown varying Capriles leads and it’s certainly difficult to believe Capriles is an underdog.  By all accounts, the fresh-faced Miranda governor has been a more-than-capable administrator in the past four years, bringing a dose of good government to Miranda after the corruption of his predecessor, Diosdado Cabello.  Furthemore, Jaua’s record as a colorless Chávez yes-man makes it seem like he’s less than likely to sweep to victory, although if Chávez’s health takes a serious turn for the worst between now and Sunday, Jaua may yet benefit from a vote of sympathy.

Capriles defeated Cabello, the governor from 2004 to 2008, in the prior election, and Cabello, who’s since become the leader of Venezuela’s PSUV-dominated National Assembly, would temporarily take over as president in the event that Chávez resigns or dies after he is sworn in for his next term (set to begin January 10), with a snap presidential election to follow within 30 days.  Despite Chávez’s speech anointing Maduro as his preferred successor, Cabello has long harbored presidential ambitions, he, along with Jaua (especially if Jaua wins) may try to become the PSUV’s presidential candidate in any such election instead.

Of course, in the event of such a rapid election, Capriles is very likely to lead the opposition against Maduro, Cabello or whomever the PSUV runs.  But that  could change if Capriles doesn’t win Sunday’s vote in Miranda handily — given his narrow loss to Chávez and the very short 30-day window for a new presidential election, Capriles may nonetheless still be the main opposition candidate.  But it would open the door for another candidate to emerge, likely from among the other six states where opposition governors are currently in power.

That brings us to Zulia state and with 3.8 million people, it’s Venezuela’s most populous.  Nestled in Venezuela’s far northwest bordering Colombia along the Caribbean coast, Zulia’s oil and agricultural wealth makes it, like Miranda, one of the country’s wealthiest states.  Pablo Pérez (pictured above, top), who widely lost the MUD’s presidential nomination to Capriles by a 2-to-1 margin way back in February 2012, is running for reelection in what should be an even more solid opposition win for Un Nuevo Tiempo (UNT, a New Era), the centrist party that was founded in Zulia in the late 1990s and which has controlled the governor’s office since 2000 (until 2008, under Manuel Rosales, who lost the 2006 presidential election against Chávez by a 25-point margin).  Pérez is running against the PSUV’s Francisco Arias Cárdenas, governor of Zulia from 1995 to 2000, though Pérez is heavily favored.  Capriles did better in Zulia than he did nationwide in October, winning 46.27% to just 53.34% for Chávez.  Both Chávez’s national government and Pérez’s UNT regional government have spent large sums on social programs in the state, and a win for the PSUV would be quite a staggering victory for chavismo.

If Capriles falters in Miranda, Pérez, who lies politically to the left of Capriles, could well become the next consensus opposition presidential candidate.

Continue reading With Chávez’s health in doubt, regional Venezuelan elections assume greater importance

Can Shinzō Abe boost Japan’s economy?

Over at Slate, Matthew Yglesias made the argument last week that the likely victory of former prime minister Shinzō Abe (安倍 晋三) and the return of the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP, or 自由民主党, Jiyū-Minshutō) to government after a three-year hiatus means that Japan might finally embark on a path of more expansionary monetary policy — namely, more quantitative easing and a higher inflation target. Japan

With Japan apparently headed back into a recession — its fifth in 15 years — that strategy could be the surest way to boost the Japanese economy, but it’s a little naive to believe Abe can command enough political support, even with a landslide victory in Sunday’s election, to dictate monetary policy to the Bank of Japan.

Earlier in the campaign, Abe pledged to force the Bank of Japan to purchase construction bonds directly from the Japanese government (although, as Yglesias notes, Abe has already backed down from that pledge during the campaign).  Abe needs the BOJ to buy those bonds in order to finance additional infrastructure spending, with the LDP calling for up to ¥200 trillion ($2.4 trillion) in public works over the next decade.  Public spending is an old LDP favorite, but that staggering amount of spending could well pull Japan’s economy out of recession and deflation.

Abe has also pledged to appoint a new bank governor — the term of the current Bank of Japan governor Masaaki Shirakawa (白川 方明) ends in April 2013 after five years heading the BOJ — who agrees to set an annual inflation target of 2% or even 3%.

Abe’s push for expansionary fiscal and monetary policy comes as a bit of a 180-degree turn, given that the third and final government of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ, or 民主党, Minshutō) under prime minister Yoshihiko Noda (野田 佳彦) recently expended its last gasp of governing willpower to double Japan’s consumption tax from 5% to 10%, which is scheduled to begin in 2014.

It seems much likelier that Abe could implement a new round of fiscal expansion than strong-arm the Bank of Japan, which has an extraordinary amount of central bank independence — derived in part from the memory of hyperinflation that resulted after World War II when politicians controlled monetary policy decisions.

Noda (pictured above, right, with Abe) has attacked Abe’s platform as a dangerous intrusion on central bank independence and he has attacked the LDP plan for additional debt-financed spending as the same old LDP  ‘baramaki’ (pork barrel) politics, especially given Japan’s debt-to-GDP ratio is already, by far, the world’s largest, at around 230%.  Greece, by the way, has only a 160% ratio.

Japan has traditionally been able to carry such a high ratio because much of that debt is held by its citizens, who collective have one of the top savings rates in the industrialized world, but with $13.64 trillion in debt already on its public books, it’s not clear whether Japan could sustain public spending that would boost its debt-to-GDP ratio to nearly 300%.

As Yglesias notes, the Bank of Japan has been criticized for nearly two decades for its policy to keep Japan’s inflation target at zero:

Back in 1999, Ben Bernanke condemned the self-induced paralysis of Japanese monetary policy made by flailing officials who claimed it was beyond their power to fix this. He called for “Rooseveltian resolve” on the part of Japan’s leaders to shake the bank out of its torpor.  Paul Krugman, too, spent the late ’90s urging Japan to aim for more inflation, arguing that mucking around with the banking system was inadequate and weird delusions of respectability were holding policymakers back.

As Yglesias also notes, Europeans and Americans promptly forgot that advice when the 2008 financial crisis exploded budget deficits:

Suddenly, criticizing the Bank of Japan went out of style. America became Japan and simultaneously forgot what America used to think about Japan.

But perhaps the lesson that Yglesias is forgetting — and the lesson that the 2008 crisis taught Europeans and Americans — is that politics matters, and that politics can intrude on what might otherwise be a clear policy path, whether it’s ‘fiscal cliff’ negotiations in the United States or the ‘kick-the-can’ politics of eurozone bailouts.

Yglesias is also forgetting that Japan has politics, too. Continue reading Can Shinzō Abe boost Japan’s economy?

Hashimoto’s once-rising Japan Restoration Party falling short as third force in Japanese politics

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Osaka mayor Tōru Hashimoto (橋下徹) is probably the most charismatic politician that Japan has seen since Junichiro Koizumi (小泉 純一郎), the wavy-haired reformist prime minister from 2001 to 2006. Japan

Shintaro Ishihara (石原慎太郎) has spent the past 13 years as governor of Tokyo and is one of Japan’s most outspokenly nationalist right-wing politicians.

So it was odd, to say the least, to see Hashimoto (pictured above, right) and Ishihara (pictured above, left) merge their two new parties, with Ishihara folding his more stridently right-wing Sunrise Party (太陽の党, Taiyō no Tō) into the Osaka-based, free-market liberal Japan Restoration Party (日本維新の会, Nippon Ishin no Kai).  Ishihara became the new leader of the merged Japan Restoration Party, with Hashimoto taking on the deputy leadership.

But given the now-schizophrenic nature of the party’s platform, it seems as if the party — once expected to become a major third party force in elections for Japan’s lower house of the Diet, the House of Representatives — may have turned out to be less than the sum of its parts.

After the Japanese turned out the long-ruling (since 1955!) Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP, or 自由民主党, Jiyū-Minshutō) and are now disillusioned with the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ, or 民主党, Minshutō), it seemed as if there were an opening for a new politician to ride the same wave to power that the DPJ rode in 2009 — especially for a young politician with Koizumi-level charisma.

But the party seems to be falling short — whereas, even in November, the party was polling in the mid-teens (ahead or even with the DPJ, and the LDP polling between 20% and 25%), it’s now fallen well below 10%, to just 4% in some polls.  Notably, most Japanese polls include a wide undecided vote (around 40% to 50%), so it’s important to take those trends with an even bigger grain of salt than we would take polls in the United States.

What that means is instead of fashioning a new opposition, Japan will instead opt for a doubling down on LDP policies under Shinzō Abe (安倍 晋三), who served as prime minister from 2006 to 2007.

If the Japan Restoration Party comes up short on Sunday, it could well frustrate Hashimoto’s career before it has even had a chance to peak.  Continue reading Hashimoto’s once-rising Japan Restoration Party falling short as third force in Japanese politics

First Past the Post: December 13

Foreign Policy profiles Beppe Grillo, the Italian blogger and comic who founded the populist Five Star Movement (interesting fact: he was convicted for manslaughter in 1983).

Uruguay’s lower house of parliament approved a same-sex marriage bill.

After the center-left’s landslide victory on Sunday, Romania’s president Traian Basesçu is looking for alternatives to name as prime minister in lieu of his nemesis, Victor Ponta.

Japan enters its fifth recession in 15 years.

Egypt’s opposition will vote against the constitution, and the referendum will be held on two voting days: December 15 and 22.

Ukraine’s parliamentary opposition tangles up the vote to appoint Mykola Azarov for a new term as prime minister.

The top two autonomist Catalan parties have agreed on an independence referendum within two years.

Kenyan vice president (and a frontrunner for the March 2013 presidential election) Uhuru Kenyatta is banned from visiting Europe.

Although it once dominated Norway, Sweden has now become a source of cheap labour — and jokes.

The war between former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and Germany begins.

Francisco Toro considers Venezuela’s succession.

Top French actor Gérard Depardieu will move to Belgium to avoid the high tax rates instituted by president François Hollande’s government.

The BJP may win a blowout landslide in Gujarat’s election, and may be rewriting Indian politics in so doing.

Just 12 days into office, Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto is proposing a wide education reform. [Spanish]

A Europe 2013 predication.

 

 

North Korea launches itself into top echelon of issues in Korean presidential race

kimjongun

With so many other economic issues to discuss in the South Korean presidential campaign, relations with North Korea had not always been at the forefront of the campaign debate, even though it was always more likely than not that the unique foreign relations challenge will eventually rise to the forefront of the  next South Korean president’s agenda in the next five years.

North Korea’s unpredictable passive-aggressive policy with respect to its southern neighbor has continued at a low hum since Kim Jong-un (pictured above) assumed leadership of the ironically named Democratic People’s Republic of Korea following the death of his father, Kim Jong-il, in December 2011.

Today, however, North Korea may have ‘launched’ itself into the presidential race by firing a rocket — literally, a long-range rocket that threatens to make North Korea a dominant issue in the presidential race:

Such developments can influence whom people will support when they go to cast their ballots, although its effects on public sentiments has yet to be determined.

“Experts are divided on the impact, with some predicting the launch will give credence to hardliners and help conservative presidential hopeful Park Geun-hye, while others said people may vote for Moon Jae-in of the liberal opposition party because they do not want an escalation of tensions,” an election watcher said.

He added that because voters are already split between the conservative and liberal camps, the latest provocation by Pyongyang may not really affect the outcome of the race.

“The country as a whole has become ‘indifferent’ having already seen the North test numerous rockets and detonated two nuclear devices,” the expert said. He added that because the launch had been expected people will be less likely to be moved.

For now, with a final presidential debate scheduled for Dec. 16, and with new polls forbidden from publication after Thursday under South Korean election law, it will remain unclear what impact the North Korean rocket launch might have on the campaign until election day.

Ultimately, however, both major candidates in the South Korean election have promised a more conciliatory policy with North Korea than outgoing South Korean president Lee Myung-bak, and many observers believe the rocket launch had more to do with internal North Korean politics than anything else.

While South Korea, with around 50 million people, has a GDP per capita of around $32,000, North Korea’s GDP per capita is something more like $2,400, despite the fact that it has just under 25 million people.  The South Korean economy exceeds $1.15 trillion to just around $45 billion in North Korea (see below a photo of the two Koreas at night from the Earth’s atmosphere).

South Korea split from North Korea after World War II, and the Korean War that began in June 1950 when the North invaded the South ultimately became the first proxy battle of the Cold War, pitting active forces from the United States against Communist forces (with the People’s Republic of China backing the North).  Despite an armistice agreement in 1953, the two Koreas have formally been in a state of war ever since, and the de-militarized zone between the two marks one of the most heavily armed borders in the world.

While it’s expected that the candidate of Lee’s party, Park Geun-hye of the Saenuri Party (새누리당 or the ‘Saenuri-dang’) would take a more hawkish tone, and Roh’s former chief of staff, Moon Jae-in, the presidential candidate of the liberal Democratic United Party (민주통합당, or the ‘Minju Tonghap-dang’) is expected to pursue a renewed variant of the once-ascendant ‘Sunshine Policy,’ the reality may well be more complicated.

Park has advocated what she uniquely calls a ‘trustpolitik‘ policy toward North Korea — more hawkish, perhaps, than previous policies of the Roh and Kim administrations, but decidedly more geared toward discussion and conciliation than the Lee administration, which Park says has failed to stem the aggression of North Korea.

Given the widespread disillusionment with the Sunshine Policy and its perceived lack of results, in addition to the relatively tighter economic conditions in South Korea, it seems unlikely that Moon would either be willing or able to pursue as wide a conciliatory policy to North Korea as the Roh and Kim administrations.

Lee has taken a hawkish attitude toward North Korea, ending the so-called ‘Sunshine Policy’ of his predecessors Roh Moo-hyun and Kim Dae-jung that had been South Korea’s policy for a decade.  Indeed, former president Kim won a Nobel Peace Prize for the policy, which resulted in summits in 2000 and 2007 to discuss further north-south cooperation in greater Korea, but mixed or negative results otherwise. Continue reading North Korea launches itself into top echelon of issues in Korean presidential race

First Past the Post: December 11

Wolfgang Münchau on the latest Italian crisis (though I would argue Monti’s economic and labor market and tax collection reforms are the more important key to Monti’s success).

The US ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, showcases her diplomatic, uh, skills.

The always-thoughtful Éric Grenier gives us his take on Ontario’s Liberal leadership race.

It’s a bad week for Caribbean prime ministers — today, it’s the arrest of Cayman Islands prime minister McKeeva Bush.

Rahul Gandhi goes to Gujarat.

Mali’s new prime minister.

A disturbing report of the Muslim Brotherhood’s conduct.

Displaced Haitians are threatened with evictions.

The Liberal Democratic Party of Japan and allies are expected to win over 300 seats in the House of Representatives.

 

The incredibly shrinking Lee Myung-bak

South Korea’s presidential elections never feature incumbents — the president is limited to a single five-year term — but that doesn’t mean incumbents don’t feature prominently in presidential elections.

In 2007, Chung Dong-young suffered from his ties to president Roh Moo-hyun, under whose administration Chung served as unification minister, and to some degree, Moon Jae-in, the presidential candidate of the liberal Democratic United Party (민주통합당, or the ‘Minju Tonghap-dang’) and Roh’s former chief of staff.

But given that incumbent president Lee Myung-bak, who will leave office as one of South Korea’s most unpopular presidents, garners approval ratings of around 20%, you’d expect that the candidate of Lee’s Saenuri Party (새누리당 or the ‘Saenuri-dang’), formerly the Grand National Party, would be suffering even more, right?

Wrong.  In South Korea’s presidential race this year, one of the reasons that Park Geun-hye has consistently held a lead over Moon has been her successful distancing from the Lee administration (although that lead is narrowing fast, especially after Park made a gaffe in the second presidential debate Monday indicating she wanted to ‘invigorate’ the underground economy).

Moon has consistently attacked Park for her party’s economic record, but the charges have not (so far) erased Moon’s deficit, even after posters surfaced trying to tie the two together as ‘Lee Myung Park Geun-hye.’

If anything, Park has been more successful by hammering away at lingering doubt about the Roh administration and Moon’s ties to it as Roh’s chief of staff.

That’s in part because while Park has attacked Roh’s administration, she’s also shown no compunction in attacking Lee’s record as well:

“The Roh Moo-hyun government wasted a period of prosperity in the world economy by indulging in ideological debates and power struggles, leading to the erosion in working-class living standards. The Lee Myung-bak government put growth before everything and failed to make lives better. I will not be a leader who will repeat the mistakes of previous governments,” Park said at a rally in Seogwipo, Jeju Island.

During the campaign, Park has attacked Lee’s administration for having failed middle class people and for exacerbating income inequality — an issue that both Park and Moon had pledged to make a top priority if elected.  Despite the rhetoric, there’s really no indication that Park’s administration would mark a vast policy difference from Lee’s administration.  If anything, Korean conservatives are incredibly united behind Park’s candidacy — more so than at any other time since the 1987 election.

But Park has long been known as an intraparty rival of Lee — no one would ever accuse Park of harboring secret affection for Lee or his accomplishments. Continue reading The incredibly shrinking Lee Myung-bak

Power, destruction, and Hello Kitty: Article 9, the Self-Defense Force and Japan’s election campaign

Among the more famous — and unique — provisions of the world’s constitutional jurisprudence is the Japanese constitution’s pacifist Article 9, which prohibits any act of war by the state.

The English translation of the article reads as follows:

Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.  In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.**

Traditionally, Article 9 has limited Japan’s military capability since World War II to a merely defensive capacity, with the country largely dependent on the United States for its external security.

But with tensions already high and rising with the People’s Republic of China over three of the tiny Senkaku Islands (Diaoyu in Chinese) since the Japanese government formally purchased the islands in September, and with the relatively more militant Shinzō Abe (安倍 晋三), leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP, or 自由民主党, Jiyū-Minshutō), increasingly set to win Japan’s snap elections on December 16 for the lower house of Japan’s parliament, the Diet, Article 9 may be set for reinterpretation.

Abe comes naturally to his more hawkish views on Japan and its military power.  As prime minister from 2006 to 2007, he tried to push a stronger interpretation of Article 9 and pursued a more aggressive foreign policy.  Moreover, as prime minister and most recently after winning the leadership of the LDP, he visited the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which honors Japan’s war dead, including several war criminals, a move that has consistently provoked China and South Korea. Abe’s grandfather Nobusuke Kishi (岸 信介) served as Japan’s prime minister from 1957 to 1960 and counts among his major accomplishments the signing of the mutual cooperation and security treaty between Japan and the United States.

Although Japan’s election campaign has also featured nuclear energy policy, the current government’s recent increase in the country’s consumption tax and economic policy for pulling Japan out of more than two decades of economic slump, the Senkaku showdown with China has highlighted Abe’s stance to revise the government’s interpretation of Article 9, at a minimum, to allow for collective self-defense.  Such a relatively more aggressive interpretation would allow Japan to join allies, such as the United States, in military actions throughout the world or possibly even join collective security alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Japan is already a major ‘non-NATO ally’).  Although all of Japan’s postwar administrations have interpreted Article 9 to prohibit such a wide interpretation, Abe and his LDP allies would prefer the capability to deploy Japanese forces alongside, for example, U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

In a sense, it’s ridiculous to say that Japan doesn’t have a military.  Its Self-Defense Force was created as an arm of the Japanese defense department in 1954, and it’s consistently grown ever since.  Although it’s technically not an army, Japan’s active forces (around 250,000) are a bit larger than either of Germany’s or the United Kingdom’s active forces.  True, under Japan’s complicated national defense policy, the Self-Defense Force is limited to exclusively defense-oriented policy, and Japan has refrained from developing nuclear weapons and traditionally worked in random to develop security arrangements with the United States.

But Japan itself has been stretching its interpretation of Article 9 for years — from 2004 to 2006, notably, Japan sent forces to Iraq to assist the United States in its occupation of Iraq, and in the past decade, Japan has become increasingly at ease with sending Self-Defense Force troops abroad to assist in humanitarian and peacekeeping arrangements, typically under the aegis of the United Nations.

The LDP’s return to government — it essentially controlled Japan from 1955 to 2009 — could not only result in a more aggressive interpretation of Article 9 to allow collective self-defense, but the re-christening of the Self-Defense Force as the more militaristic National Defense Force, and a full-fledged revision of Article 9 to allow Japan to have a full military like any other country, especially as the memory of Japan’s imperial army during World War II fades from memory and Japan feels increasingly vulnerable from a strengthening Chinese presence in East Asia. Continue reading Power, destruction, and Hello Kitty: Article 9, the Self-Defense Force and Japan’s election campaign

First Past the Post: December 10

A nice profile of Leoluca Orlando, the anti-mafia mayor of Palermo.

Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi suspends his controversial decree, but empowers Egypt’s army in advance of Dec. 15 constitutional referendum.

Brazilian authorities have arrested the former Turks and Caicos prime minister.

The government of Malta’s prime minister Lawrence Gonzi has fallen after the 2013 budget failed to pass by a one-vote margin (elections are scheduled for March 9).

Moldova leapfrogs Ukraine on Europe’s remaining to-do list.

Xi Jinping’s already differentiating himself from Hu Jintao.

The high price of a bailout for tiny Cyprus.

No major surprises during the second of three presidential debates in advance of South Korea’s Dec. 19 vote.  Another wrap-up here.

Former Tokyo vice governor Naoki Inose leads in the nine-candidate field competing in the Tokyo gubernatorial election on Dec. 16.

More Tory backlash on gay marriage rights in the United Kingdom (which Tory PM David Cameron supports).

Germany’s center-left Social Democrats formally nominate Peer Steinbrück as its candidate for chancellor.  He’s now on Twitter.

The Republican Left of Catalunya is edging closer to coalition with Artur Mas’s CiU.

French president François Hollande now has a 60% disapproval rate (35% approval).

Tzipi Livni is taking aim at… everyone in Israeli politics, including Labor, Yesh Atid and other opponents of Benjamin Netanyahu.