Despite widespread condemnation of political fundraising parties and calls to abolish them, eliminating them has proved difficult.
To succeed in Japanese politics, it’s long been said that a politician must have and maintain three things: a strong local voter base, strong personal connections in a wide variety of places and a fat purse. In deciding on party membership, a party’s stance on specific issues often matters less than whether or not a politician believes joining a particular party is the best way to ensure the money is available to maintain the local voter base and deepen the personal connections needed for reelection.
So where does that money come from?
Among major political parties, only two smaller ones have their own businesses that provide financial assistance to their members. According to its latest political fund report released in November, more than ¥7.3 billion of Komeito’s revenue for 2022 came from party-affiliated enterprises, such as the Komei Shimbun newspaper. The Japanese Communist Party (JCP), meanwhile, earned ¥16 billion from a variety of sources, including Shimbun Akahata.
In addition, registered political parties can qualify for public funds. The JCP, however, does not accept this form of funding, and is the only major party to refuse it.
For other parties, some of the total income a member of parliament receives from their political party comes from public funds. Money is allocated to nine major political parties according to the number of lawmakers they have and the percentage of votes they received in recent national elections.
While the JCP does not accept public funds, the Liberal Democratic Party headquarters received ¥16 billion in public money, or 64.3% of its total revenue (¥24.9 billion) in 2022, which it then distributed to its members. The Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDP) was even more reliant on public funds, accepting about ¥6.8 billion — or 74.1% of its ¥9.2 billion total revenue.
The public funds are too small for larger parties to provide politicians with much-needed money, which is also used to pay for secretarial staff, a particularly large expense that is difficult to be covered elsewhere.
Current laws allow lawmakers to hire three secretaries at the government's expense. These secretaries have a wide range of tasks, including preparing official documents, attending meetings as the member of parliament’s official representative, and dealing with all manner of people who wish to meet with and lobby the lawmaker on some issue.
However, for many parliamentarians, three is not nearly enough to cover all of the work that needs to be done. They are free to hire as many private secretaries as they think they need to do the job at whatever rates they can afford, but they have to bear the cost of their salaries and their related expenses.
For the LDP in particular, money from political fundraising parties often went toward paying the salaries and expenses of additional private secretaries.
Members of some parties, especially the LDP, are now heavily reliant on private secretaries, resulting in a situation where they need to hold fundraising parties to pay for them.
Political parties for which public money makes up a greater proportion of their income, such as the CDP, are pushing for an outright ban on private fundraising parties.
But even CDP leaders were forced to cancel scheduled political fundraising parties for party executives earlier this week amid criticism that holding them was inconsistent with its call to ban them.
On Wednesday, the LDP presented a draft amendment on how to reform the political refunds law and tighten up transparency on political fundraising parties. A major bone of contention between the LDP and Komeito had been the threshold for disclosing information about fundraising party ticket buyers. Komeito's mandatory disclosure level was ¥50,000 ($320) per event, while the LDP originally sought a level of ¥100,000 per event.
On Friday, however, the LDP and Komeito agreed that ¥50,000 would be the threshold.
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