Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan on Thursday survived a no-confidence vote by offering to resign once he has overcome the worst of the country’s nuclear crisis, in a last-minute deal with ruling party rebels who had threatened to oust him from office.
Kan’s offer to step down, probably in the autumn, buys him time to prepare an extra budget to fund the rebuilding cost of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, but does little to resolve the country’s long-running political and policy paralysis.
Thanks to Kan’s maneuvering, the parliamentary no-confidence motion — brought by the opposition over his handling of the country’s deepest crisis since World War Two — was comfortably defeated by 293 to 152 votes.
Yet, weakened by rifts within his own party, Kan may be seen as a lame duck by the opposition and have little luck with tax and social security reforms, which Japan badly needs to contain its bulging debt and which require opposition backing in a divided parliament.
A No. 2 in the biggest opposition party, the Liberal Democratic Party, made plain it had no intention to make things any easier for the ruling Democrats despite Kan’s offer.
“We plan to carry forward while holding a strong belief that the continuation of the Kan government is not good for the country or for the people,” Secretary General Nobuteru Ishihara told reporters.
He restated his party’s position that it would block a bill needed to finance 44 percent of this fiscal year’s $1 trillion budget unless the Democrats ditched their spending promises.
Kan, who took office almost exactly a year ago as Japan’s fifth minister in as many years, is battling to control a radiation crisis at the Fukushima plant which was knocked out by the tsunami. He also needs to come up with a plan to pay for rebuilding the tsunami-hit region north of Tokyo without allowing debt, already twice the size of the $5 trillion economy to spin out of control.
