The Aso government has indicated plans to use the upcoming emergency G7 finance ministers summit to urge the US to adopt a Japan-style capital injection of troubled banks. The Nikkei backs up this position in an editorial: “The US and Europe must press the need for an injection of capital [into failing financial institutions] to assuage financial uncertainty.”
Of course, the US will probably have little choice but to inject capital anyway (the UK is already doing something similar), so Aso’s advice might simply be a ploy to try and take credit for something he had nothing to do with.
That was pretty much my reaction to the news. Did Aso see how well this bullshit worked for McCain, and then think that he would get his party to win the election by doing the same crap? It seems more than reasonable for the people to have a chance to maybe get a vote when a new PM is elected.
On a related note, why does the PM have the power to dissolve parliament anyway? Why don’t the MPs just serve out actual terms, which end and are then followed by elections?
From Wiki:
“The head of government, usually called the prime minister or premier, will ideally have the support of a majority in the responsible house, and must in any case be able to ensure the existence of no absolute majority against the government. If the parliament passes a resolution of no confidence, or refuses to pass an important bill such as the budget, then the government must either resign so that a different government can be appointed or seek a parliamentary dissolution so that new general elections may be held in order to re-confirm or deny the government’s mandate.”
Aso has no obligation to dissolve parliament but his government is widely seen as having lost its mandate even if they are in no real danger of an intra-parliamentary revolt (though of course that gets bandied about quite often, as I assiduously noted during the Abe days).
To directly answer your question about MPs, imagine if there is no dissolution power and a ruling coalition formed immediately after an election falls apart one year into a PM’s term. The PM would be forced to resign and a series of backroom deals would produce a new PM under a new coalition formed without the input of the electorate. This could conceivably continue for the next three years, with governments coming and going based on whatever political gain some minority coalition partner may be trying to achieve. As I understand it, the idea is that the electorate should have an active input into who should run the country.
The question I have is, why does the PM have the power to dissolve the Diet at will? My summation is that it’s a sort of protection against the above-mentioned internal skullduggery. If a PM’s polling numbers are low, either people will maneuver to readjust the coalition in an attempt to replace him or he can call an election and ask the people what they want.
I like this feature of the Westminster system — it maintains checks and balances, as well as a modicum of popular control over the whole government spectacle. If parliament decides it’s time to oust the PM, the PM can try to defeat parliament with the sword of public opinion.
Regular elections would work, but look at the US — everyone knows the government is blindingly incompetent and effectively mortgaging its national power, but nobody can do anything about it for another few months. In some ways, allowing the key organs to force elections is desirable to maintain accountability, although it does lead to a revolving door at the prime minister’s house…
“The question I have is, why does the PM have the power to dissolve the Diet at will?”
This isn`t really a Japanese thing – Canada is the same and (I`m pretty sure – the UK, Australia, and NZ). Japan`s system is based on the UK model and this was the source of many of the problems outlined above. Its not perfect and we usually have no idea when an election is coming, but many Canadians, for example, are perplexed by the amount of time that US politicians spend campaigning instead of governing.
Britain doesn’t have fixed terms either. The maximum length of a parliamentary term is five years but it is up to the discretion of the incumbent PM and it is common for a PM doing well in the polls to call one after four years. When Gordon Brown succeeded Tony Blair (without a General Election or leadership election) he considered dissolving Parliament immediately but his poll numbers collapsed so he held off. Conceivably, he could resign and yet another leader take over without any legal need to have a General election but recent media reporting has suggested that it would be unwise. I don’t, however, think a Prime Minister kicked out of power can call an election if he’s no longer the head of his party. That is, I can’t envisage a situation such as the one Adamu describes above and I think Japan is the same.
John Major lost the confidence of his party when he was Prime Minister so he resigned and called a leadership election – not a General election – and won, which allowed him to stay on. If he had lost, then the new party leader would have been Prime Minister. What I’m suggesting is, if there is backroom dealing to unseat a sitting PM in Japan or the UK then he or she will be turfed out before they can exercise any power to call an election. It’s not necessarily worse that a Government may change several times over the period of a parliamentary term without the electorate being given a chance to vote, just a different form of democracy.
If you are saying a PM will simply be kicked out of office by his own backers and precluded from calling an election immediately after sentiment turns against him, that is demonstrably not true. But I think you bring up an important point — the dissolution power can both reward a successful government with more seats or serve as a way to hear from the electorate on the downside.
In Japan if a no confidence motion passes in the Lower House there is basically an automatic general election. That has happened before.
However, PMs do actually call elections themselves in times of political turmoil or when they are down in the polls. In the past a symbolic motion of no confidence from the opposition party could be enough reason to call an election.
But no confidence measures are not a danger to the current LDP with a comfortable majority in the Lower House all by themselves. And the symbolic no confidence votes don’t seem to produce the same shame they did back in the day. Instead PMs seem to lose the confidence of intraparty factions, so as you point out they use another method, namely resigning and appointing another PM without an election. With this method we can see the problem of diminishing returns as the public does not automatically support a new PM and gets impatient about the next election.
LDP presidents have terms of 3 years and they cannot just be immolated as soon as sentiment within the party changes. To remove a president without him quitting first I assume would involve some sort of disciplinary committee. And it should embarrass the party if the PM did not get the backing of his party, or at least the intraparty faction he patronizes. There are definitely times when the PM is forced to resign but that’s not the only way it can work.
Also, remember that Japan’s politics was sometimes a theatrical farce between the LDP and the Socialists – they would often negotiate the passage of laws and even the timing of the general election through back channels, so a lot of these rules were kind of pro forma. Now that system is dead, followed by political turmoil of the 90s, then the formation of the DPJ and the Koizumi era, and now in the post-Koizumi era it seems like people are kind of fumbling around for the way forward. That said, the idea that the rules matter less than doing the honorable thing is still very strong, as you see from the media reports.