As the Lower House election campaign goes into full swing, Japanese voters face an important decision: whether to endorse the reform politics of Liberal Democratic Party leader and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, or a different kind of reform politics pushed by the opposition Democratic Party of Japan. The two parties also hold different views on foreign policy.
The ruling LDP has entered the campaign split by a dispute over postal service privatization bills that were rejected by the Upper House on Aug. 8 after some LDP members withheld their support. The split was made permanent when the LDP leadership decided to field its own candidates -- dubbed "assassins" by the media -- to run against LDP rebels in their own constituencies. This situation may offer the DPJ a chance to beat the LDP-New Komeito coalition.
Mr. Koizumi is attempting to turn the election into a virtual referendum on the privatization bills, which call for privatizing and dividing Japan Post in April 2007 into four companies -- mail, savings, insurance and network operations -- and placing them under a holding company. His message boils down to this: Vote for candidates who support the privatization bills.