Koizumi: Thatcher in Blair clothing?

Brendan Howe, The Korea Herald, Asia News Network/Seoul

So Japan's maverick Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi won his gamble, calling a snap election when defeated in Parliament, only to be returned with the strongest mandate enjoyed by a leader of the governing Liberal Democratic Party in decades. Who then is Koizumi, and where, politically, does he come from? We could do worse than make comparisons with the political situation in that other enigmatic island nation, Britain.

Koizumi is by far, domestically, Japan's most popular politician, and internationally the most recognizable. His hair- style and musical tastes identify him as somebody caste from a different mould than the grey-suited, sensibly coiffured politicians who had dominated Japanese public life prior to his arrival as Prime Minister in 2001, on a ticket and mandate to transform Japan's political landscape.

He is a crusading reformer who has not allowed the traditions, or even members of his own party to stand in his way. Those rebels, who did have the temerity to stand against his hand- picked replacements for their seats in the most recent election, were on the whole soundly beaten.

Parallels could be drawn with the zealously reformist Tony Blair. When he first triumphantly swept to power, Blair was another populist politician with youth appeal. Blair also sported a pretty wild hairstyle, loved rock music, and seemed cut from a different cloth than his predecessors. Blair too faced, and soundly crushed, those within his own party who resisted his top- down revolution, expelling Militant, and destroying Socialist Labor at the polls.

Both these leaders have become the most successful (at least in terms of the ballot box) leaders in their respective parties' histories despite, or maybe because of the fact that they apparently stood for very different things from the traditional values of the parties they head.

However, this is where the similarities end. Blair's internal opposition came from those on the left of his party who were resisting his attempt to drag Labor towards the center of the political landscape. Koizumi has been resisted by those in his party (which is right rather than left of center) who have disagreed with his radical attempts to drag the LDP towards the right in terms of economic privatization and "normalization" of foreign policy.

Thus to a certain extent, Blair triumphed against extremists to make his party more moderate, whereas Koizumi triumphed against moderates to make his party more extreme.

It is important here to remember the political and economic issue which triggered the back-bench rebellion, defeat of Koizumi in Parliament and subsequent triumphant return at the head of a new, larger, and purged majority; his pet project of privatizing the Japanese Post Office. Blair's New Labor briefly toyed with the idea of privatizing the British equivalent, the Royal Mail, but eventually shied away from it because of a pre-election promise made to trade unions.

And this is the fundamental difference between these two free- wheeling, populist, political mavericks. They may both have taken something from British Conservative Party Leader and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's privatization policies of the 1980s, and they might both be staunch allies of President George W. Bush in his War on Terror, but Blair remains at heart, a centrist, whereas Koizumi is a right-wing radical.

Koizumi seems intent on out-Thatchering Thatcher in the economic field, launching a liberalization and privatization frenzy that encompasses even those parts of the economy (such as the post office) that Thatcher herself dared not touch.

In terms of foreign policy, Koizumi shows insensitivity towards his neighbors unparalleled since Margaret Thatcher seemed to manage to offend almost the whole of the rest of the European Union. Koizumi has infuriated China and South Korea by regularly visiting the Yasukuni shrine to Japan's war dead.

He has also called for Japan to "normalize" its foreign policy in terms of Japanese troops serving overseas, bringing back haunting memories of previous Japanese imperialism. Perhaps the greatest fear is that like Thatcher, Koizumi will be willing to go to war over territorial disputes involving small groups of islands.

I just think that we should all be aware that no matter how "liberal" Koizumi may appear in his dress sense and musical tastes, under that outer skin lurks a serious economic and political radical, whom his opponents at least, to their cost, have learned not to underestimate.

The writer is an assistant professor of diplomacy and security at Ewha Graduate School of International Studies.