Japan Democrats’ Ozawa says winning majority tough

By Yuko Yoshikawa and Linda Sieg

TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan’s opposition Democratic Party will
have trouble achieving its goal of gaining a majority in the
September 11 election, the party’s No. 2 leader said on Friday
after a week of dismal opinion polls, but he said it has a good
chance of taking power by winning the most seats in the lower
house.

Support for Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s Liberal
Democratic Party (LDP) has risen in the nearly three weeks
since Koizumi called a general election after rebels in his
long-ruling party joined with the opposition to defeat bills to
privatize the postal system, the core of his reform agenda.

In contrast to recent election campaigns, backing for the
Democrats has slipped since the lower house was dissolved.

“If we had an election right now, we could not defeat the
LDP,” Ozawa, 63, told Reuters in an interview. “If we can send
the people a strong signal to turn this mood around, a message
that is easy to understand, then we can win.”

But he added: “Our goal is to win a majority on our own.
That is very difficult.

“But if we change the mood a bit, we can become the party
with the biggest number of seats. At that point…I think we
can secure a majority to form a government with the Democrats
at the core.”

Ozawa, a former LDP heavyweight, bolted the party in 1993
and helped engineer a reformist coalition that briefly took
power.

Democratic Party leader Katsuya Okada has said his party
aimed to win a majority and form a government on its own.

But speculation has simmered that Ozawa, known in the past
for his skill at forging political deals, was eyeing a tie-up
with two tiny parties formed by LDP rebels as a way for the
Democrats to take power should they fall short of a majority.

Ozawa acknowledged said that the Democrats’ own research
compiled earlier this week has shown that the party would win
only about 150 seats — down from 175 — in the 480-member
lower house if the election had been held then.

Ozawa noted, however, that Koizumi’s own goal was for his
two-party coalition to win a majority, rather than for the LDP
to take more than half the seats on its own.

The Asahi newspaper reported the LDP’s own survey had shown
that the LDP and its coalition partner, the New Komeito party,
could win around 250 seats, or at least more than 240, down
from a total of 283 when the lower house was dissolved on
August 8.

Thirty-seven LDP lower house lawmakers voted against the
postal privatization bills, and Koizumi refused to put them on
the party slate.

URBAN VOTERS

“I think we have the momentum to get a majority, and I want
to keep up this momentum right to the end,” New Komeito leader
Takenori Kanzaki told a news conference.

“About the LDP view that we can get 240 to 250 seats, I do
think there is a good chance, but with an election you don’t
know how things will change, so to be absolutely sure of this
we need to continue our efforts right to the very end,” Kanzaki
said.

Media coverage of Koizumi’s high-profile battle with LDP
rebels and his tactic of sending younger, often female
candidates to fight his old guard rivals has been drowning out
the Democratic Party’s message that other issues such as
pension reform mattered more than privatizing the postal
system.

Ozawa acknowledged that the Democrats were in a tight spot
in cities, where so-called “floating voters” who shun party
affiliation have tended to back the opposition. “In the big
cities now, the eyes of floating voters are turning a bit
toward Koizumi’s performance, his magic,” Ozawa said. “That is
even more the case because the Democrats’ message is not
reaching them clearly.”

The Asahi reported on Thursday that only 9 percent of
big-city voters who replied to the newspaper’s survey on August
22-23 planned to vote for the Democratic Party, down from 17
percent in an August 15-17 poll.