Marxism International

The Financial Times is reporting tonight that Japanese Prime Minister Junichero Koizumi has won a “landslide victory” over dissidents in his own Liberal Democratic Party in today’s parliamentary elections.   He has also dispatched the opposition Democrats, clearing the way for a thorough revamping of how Japan does business.

In so doing, he has successfully aped the winning strategies employed by a number of Washington’s allies, like Alberto Fujimori of Peru and Nepal’s King Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah and others who, when the going got rough asked and received America’s go-ahead to do things their way.

Of course, Japan had to observe the perfunctory niceties of an election, but it amounts to the same thing.   Whereas Mr Fujimori (now in disgraceful exile in Japan) and King Gyanendra (whose rule does not look long for this world) had to fill the streets with tanks, Prime Minister Koizumi had to lay out a lot of cold cash.   Still, it’s chump change when you look at what investors stand to gain by the now all-but-certain 3 TRILLION DOLLAR privatization of Japan’s postal system.   It will release hundreds of billions of dollars from savings and insurance bonds into the private sector and will temporarily at least provide some relief to Japan’s cash-starved economy.

It is unlikely to be forgotten by the LDP old-timers how Koizumi sold them short to grab this prize.  He sent out a legion of young, brash and ruthless “assassins” to run against dissenters and nay-sayers and ran most of them into the ground.   Japanese politics has been turned upside-down.   Washington is delighted.   But, deep and cavernous divisions have been opened on the home front.

The tactic of the self-coup, initially successful, looks to be around for awhile.   In Germany, Angela Merkel looks poised to win the German elections on the 18th, though with less than the majority needed to push their radical “reforms” (read: further impoverishment of the working class, tax cuts for the rich, “taming” of the unions, etc).  In fact, she will probably have to form a Grand Alliance with the currently ruling Social Democrats.    The current Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, has flubbed his own version of the self-coup (dissolving parliament like the others while similarly arguing that it is the incompetents around him and not his policies that have brought things up short).  The hapless Mr Schroeder is on the eve of being kicked out of office to make way for Ms Merkel, though in all likelihood his party will govern alongside hers.

Fast forward two or three years down the road.   Merkel’s government is rapidly failing on all fronts.  Obstreperous members of her own party and those of her governing coaltion have stymied her attempts at privatization, social annihilation and the turning of the German economy into a Malaysia-like sweatshop of the investors’ dream.   What to do?   Dissolve parliament while convincing the voters that hers is the only way forward.  In the meantime, draft a number of young, attractive and ruthless candidates to overthrow recalcitrant old-guarders in her own coaltion (while picturing herself as the heroic but besieged “reformer”, and so on and so forth.

The luxurious option of replacing one’s opponents from one’s own political stable can only be exercised for so long and only so often.   As Mr Fujimori discovered (and as King Gyanendra is now learning the hard way), fundamental problems require fundamental solutions which go far beyond changing one’s entourage at Court.   The economies of Japan and Germany, like the insurrections in Peru and Nepal (and elsewhere) remain the intransigent features of societies in crises.   

Enervating exercises of political musical chairs played out before an increasingly sceptical and impoverished public can only work for so long.    But, the run can be long, perhaps longer than the current rulers of Germany and Japan need envisage.

We’ll see.