Posted on 09/14/2005 10:32:13 AM PDT by Uncle Joe Cannon
Japanese voters worried by Koizumi landslide-poll
Wed Sep 14, 2005 5:24 AM BST8
By Isabel Reynolds
TOKYO (Reuters) - Public support for Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has jumped after his weekend election victory, but many voters are worried that his party's big majority will make the popular Japanese leader arrogant.
Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) took 296 of the 480 seats in parliament's lower house in Sunday's election.
The LDP's coalition partner New Komeito took 31 seats, giving the ruling bloc more than the two-thirds of seats needed to dominate the chamber with majorities in all committees and override objections from the upper house if need be.
Koizumi had gambled his premiership by calling the election when rebels within his party joined the opposition to vote down his postal privatisation bills in the upper house last month.
Sixty-one percent of respondents to a daily Yomiuri Shimbun opinion poll conducted on Monday and Tuesday supported Koizumi, up about eight percent from a poll just before the election.
Two separate surveys by business daily Nihon Keizai Shimbun and the liberal Asahi Shimbun on the same days put support for Koizumi at 54 percent and 55 percent, respectively.
Many Japanese, though, fear Koizumi could interpret his mandate for reform as free rein to set his own agenda.
Two-thirds of respondents to the Yomiuri survey said they were worried Koizumi might force policies through and a similar proportion in the Nihon Keizai survey said the LDP had too many seats.
Koizumi is tightening his grip over his party, increasingly bypassing the system of factions that has traditionally formed a sort of opposition within the LDP, according to media reports.
TRAINING PROGRAMME
The maverick prime minister plans to set up a training programme for the more than 80 new first-term LDP lawmakers, many of them disciples known as "Koizumi's children", and is advising them to avoid joining any party factions, media said.
In an editorial headlined "System of checks loses power", the Asahi said the upper house would lose its significance because the size of the LDP's majority means it can push legislation through the powerful lower house without upper house support.
A hefty majority of voters -- some 69 percent -- also want Koizumi to improve relations with Asian neighbours including China, which have chilled during his four years in office, the Nihon Keizai survey showed.
Relations between Asia's two largest economies hit their lowest levels in decades in April, when disputes over a range of issues from depiction of World War Two in school textbooks to territorial rights erupted into sometimes violent anti-Japan protests in China.
Forty-six percent of respondents to the Nihon Keizai poll said Koizumi should halt his visits to the Yasukuni shrine for the war dead, seen by many in Asia as a symbol of the militarism behind Japan's invasion of much of the region in the early 20th century. That topped the 32 percent who want him to keep going, the paper said.
The Yomiuri based the results of its poll on 989 responses to a telephone survey. The Asahi telephone poll was based on 1,005 responses, while the Nihon Keizai poll was carried out on the Internet.
My oh my, this poll is hilarious.
It looks like the MSM in Japan is little different from over here. Kouzomi wins a historic landslide, and they're already attempting to undermine his mandate with bogus polls.
Well, that's ONE election that the Liberals won!
Ooops, wrong country!
BWAHAHHAHHHAHHAAHAHAHAHAHHHHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAAH!
And we know what comes this weekend in Germany...
They should be worried.
Leaders arrogant? Naw, say it isn't so.
But Japanese hair-care products sellers are very pleased!
A majority of voters are disgusted by his popularity with the voters.
LOL, the same people who elected Koizumi just recently. Obviously, it's the media who's worried.
If the voters are so worried, how did he win by a landslide? This makes no sense.
"Junichiro Koizumi"
Isn't he the Iron Chef?
Actually no, the LDP in japan is far, far, far more conservitive then the Democratic Party in america. Koizumi favors privatization of most industries, something liberals would hate.
So the liberals still haven't won an election.
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