Now that the budget for fiscal 2019 has passed, the Diet has cleared the most important hurdle of the current session. The struggle between the ruling and opposition camps in the latter half of the session will become one where both camps are strongly aware of the House of Councillors election slated for summer.
The government and ruling parties intend to get through the session while averting the pattern of confrontation with the opposition parties as much as possible and maintaining their current approval rating.
Taking safe measures
"We are resolved to exert all our powers on the upcoming election," Toshihiro Nikai, secretary general of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, said in a comment issued following the passage of the budget through the Diet on Wednesday.
With the upper house election slated for this year -- the Year of the Boar -- when unified local elections are also to be held, it is thought that the ruling party will have an uphill battle on its hands. As such, the government and ruling parties plan "to take safe measures from first to last" at the Diet.
The bills newly proposed by the government so far total 56, which ties with the record low for an ordinary Diet session, excepting the one when the House of Representatives was dissolved.
Initially, the ruling parties had intended to submit a bill to revise the Copyright Law, a bill designed to reinforce measures to combat websites with pirated content. The bill's content was criticized online and elsewhere, which the ruling parties interpreted as their possibly becoming a target of the opposition parties, so they immediately canceled the planned submission.
With regard to free preschool education and childcare programs, which is the highest priority for the government in the latter half of the current Diet session, the ruling parties intend to pass a bill in the lower house to revise the children and child-rearing support law as early as early April.
As all households with children aged 3 to 5 would be eligible for the programs, the opposition parties have criticized them as giving preferential treatment to the wealthy. However, as a large number of voters would benefit from the programs, a senior LDP lawmaker presumes that "the opposition parties won't completely resist, either."
With regard to a bill to revise such laws as the Child Abuse Prevention Law, a key comprehensive bill for which Prime Minister Shinzo Abe also takes part in deliberations, the LDP and the opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDPJ) have confirmed their cooperation, making it unlikely the bill will bring about a confrontation.
Hiroshi Moriyama, chairman of the LDP Diet Affairs Committee, said Wednesday, "I hope the best possible law can be created, by negotiating well with opposition parties," indicating the party's flexible stance on talks to modify the bill.
Abe's air of composure
Although the ordinary Diet session was convened later than usual this year, due to such factors as Abe's visits to foreign countries, the budget for next fiscal year passed within the current fiscal year without much confusion.
In the first half of the current session, opposition parties questioned the government chiefly over the issue of improper handling of labor statistics. But there is a view, as Komeito leader Natsuo Yamaguchi put it, that "there were divergences in disputed points [during questioning by the opposition parties], which prevented the Diet discussion from becoming constructive."
The Cabinet approval rating remains almost unchanged at 50 percent, according to a Yomiuri Shimbun survey from March 22 through 24.
With summit talks for the Group of 20 major economies and regions slated to be held for the first time in Japan on June 28-29 in Osaka, officials close to Abe said with confidence that the ruling parties will be able to take the lead in the upper house election if the government can achieve tangible diplomatic results at the summit.
Following the passage of the fiscal 2019 budget, Abe told reporters with a composed air, "Thanks to kind cooperation, we have been able to get the next fiscal budget passed into law safely within the current fiscal year."
Cause for concern
Yet there are also causes for concern.
Yoshitaka Sakurada, minister in charge of the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games, has recently made yet another remark with a factual error, saying that national roads and the Tohoku Expressway were fortunately still passable after the Great East Japan Earthquake. His remarks were in reference to the status of roads being repaired following the major quake and tsunami in March 2011.
The government lowered its assessment of the nation's economy for the first time in three years, in its monthly economic report for March. If the economic slowdown becomes more of a real possibility, there may be more public backlash against the consumption tax rate hike, planned for October.
When the government was led by the first Abe Cabinet 12 years ago, the LDP suffered a crushing defeat in the upper house election, which was attributable to a number of flawed pension records that surfaced. This became a big issue in the Diet after the budget had been passed.
A senior ruling party lawmaker said on Wednesday: "Relaxing our guard must be avoided at all costs. We need to maintain our sense of tension during the second half of the Diet session, as well."
Read more from The Japan News at https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/
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