Japan government vows to press on after election blow
TOKYO (AFP) — Japan's beleaguered Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda pledged Monday to push ahead with plans to reimpose an unpopular tax despite a big defeat in the first parliamentary by-election since he took over.
An opposition-backed candidate won the open seat in Sunday's contest in western Yamaguchi prefecture, which had been seen as a referendum on Fukuda's cabinet amid dwindling public support.
Senior opposition leader Yukio Hatoyama called the result "a hard blow to the Fukuda government."
"We made a leap towards the birth of an Ozawa government," he said, referring to chief opposition leader Ichiro Ozawa.
"We will work tirelessly to put the cabinet into the corner in order to reflect the public will," he said.
But Fukuda said he would press ahead with plans to reinstitute a special petrol tax, which expired at the start of April because the opposition was against it.
The government said it would use its two-thirds majority in the lower house on Wednesday to override the opposition-run upper house.
"We have to think about the overall situation," Fukuda told reporters.
"We're thinking about people but at the same time we also have to think about local governments, which we cannot ignore," he said.
Fukuda says that ending the tax, which adds 25 yen (25 US cents) to each litre at the pump, will cost heavily indebted Japan some 2.6 trillion yen (26 billion dollars) a year.
The opposition, arguing that the tax hurts ordinary people, has threatened to pass a censure motion urging Fukuda to call early elections if the government rams the bill through.
The opposition threats "would never stop us from parliamentary discussion on bills," chief government spokesman Nobutaka Machimura said.
A censure motion is not legally binding. Fukuda has repeatedly said he does not want a general election before Japan hosts the summit of the Group of Eight rich nations in July.
The main opposition Democratic Party has pledged to create a true two-party system in Japan, where Fukuda's Liberal Democrats have been in power for all but 10 months since 1955.
In Sunday's by-election, Hideo Hiraoka, a former lawmaker backed by the opposition, garnered 116,348 votes against 94,404 by Shigetaro Yamamoto, a former bureaucrat fielded by the ruling bloc.
It was the first election to national office since Fukuda, a 71-year-old political veteran, replaced the unpopular Shinzo Abe in September after the opposition won control of one house of parliament.
But the Fukuda government's approval has recently tumbled to Abe-like levels of below 30 percent in the wake of a series of scandals and a controversial new insurance programme.
Starting this month, medical insurance costs are directly deducted from pension benefits of people aged 75 or older. Pensioners flooded government offices with complaints saying the system was confusing and fearing they would pay more.
Machimura acknowledged that the issue was key to the election loss.
"I think that our insufficient explanation about the medical plan hit us directly," Machimura said.
"I don't think there's anything wrong with the plan itself. Whoever takes the office would come up with the same idea," he said.
Japan has one of the world's most rapidly ageing populations, raising concerns about how the government will pay for rising medical costs and pension benefits.
