Japan’s battered opposition set to pick new leader

By Linda Sieg

TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan’s opposition Democratic Party will
pick a new leader on Friday in an effort to restore its
tattered credibility with voters.

But worries have already surfaced that the fractious group
will have trouble uniting whoever wins.

That would be good news for the ruling Liberal Democratic
Party (LDP), which will have to fight an upper house election
next year without popular Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi at
the helm since he plans to step down in September.

Two veteran lawmakers with starkly different styles are
competing to replace Seiji Maehara, who resigned as party
leader last week over a botched attempt to discredit the LDP.

The Democrats, Japan’s main opposition party, were already
suffering from a beating in a general election last September.

Front-runner Ichiro Ozawa, 63, a former heavyweight in the
LDP, has a high public profile and a reputation as a reformer,
traits that could help the Democrats restore their public
image.

However, he has been accused of autocratic tactics that
have made him enemies inside the party.

Ozawa bolted from the LDP with about 40 other lawmakers in
1993, setting off a chain reaction that ended its four-decade
rule and replaced it for a year with a reform-minded coalition.

The other contender, former grassroots activist Naoto Kan,
59, won public support for exposing a scandal involving
HIV-contaminated blood when he was health minister.

His reputation as a fiery orator contrasts sharply with
Ozawa’s image as a dealmaker.

After resigning from the top Democratic Party post in May
2004, Kan narrowly lost a race against Maehara last September.

The leadership battle has revived fears that the party, an
amalgam of conservatives and former Socialists, will be unable
to unify after the vote, a worry both Ozawa and Kan tried to
ease in a joint appearance on public broadcaster NHK on
Thursday.

“It’s a very difficult situation into which we are
propelling ourselves, but we have to halt this and turn
ourselves around,” Ozawa said. “We will not disintegrate.”