Koike won’t run in election

Japan accepts just 3 refugees

TOKYO, Oct 3, (Agencies): Popular Tokyo governor Yuriko Koike named 192 candidates Tuesday for her new party that aims to wrest power from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, but insisted she would not stand herself in the Oct 22 election.

Former TV anchorwoman Koike has shaken up Japan’s usually sleepy political scene by launching her “Party of Hope”, vowing a break with the old school represented by Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

Koike plans eventually to have at least 233 candidates for the snap election — giving her a theoretical chance of taking a majority in the powerful lower house of Japan’s 465-seat parliament.

But the 65-year-old categorically denied her own candidacy. Asked if she planned to run in the election, she told reporters: “100 percent no. I’ve been saying that from the beginning.”

Her remarks came after weekend opinion polls by the Yomiuri Shimbun daily showed only 12 percent of voters would approve of her quitting her governorship of the capital to run for prime minister.

Politics

Tomoaki Iwai, professor of politics at Nihon University in Tokyo, said her reluctance to go all in would overshadow her party’s campaign.

“She appears to have concluded that she may not be able to take power this time. She thinks this is not a decisive moment,” Iwai told AFP.

More than half the candidates presented by Koike Tuesday were former members of the Democratic Party (DP) — previously Japan’s main opposition party — which imploded last week.

The election is now effectively a three-horse race between the conservative LDP, Koike’s party of hope and a new centre-left party made up of former DP members that did not want to jump on the Tokyo governor’s bandwagon.

The latest opinion polls showed that 34 percent of Japanese planned to vote for the LDP, while 19 percent favoured Koike’s new party.

One quarter of those polled were still undecided.

Abe’s LDP, meanwhile, unveiled its election manifesto, including a revision of the pacifist constitution but dropping a previous pledge to restore the nation’s finances to surplus.

Koike has been getting negative media coverage for saying she would “exclude” candidates who do not agree with her party’s policies — a stance seen as barring liberal members of the failed main opposition Democratic Party from joining.

Leaders of the Democratic Party — a fractious mix of conservatives and liberals — decided last week it would not run candidates of its own but let members run from Koike’s party.

Koike’s comment was applauded by some as an effort to ensure policy consistency but by others as a dictatorial manoeuvre.

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Japan accepted just three refugees in the first half of 2017 despite receiving a record 8,561 fresh asylum applications, the government said on Tuesday, highlighting the nation’s reluctance to accept foreigners.

Only four refugees were accepted in the first half of 2016, when fresh asylum applications totaled 5,011, the Justice Ministry said. The Human Rights Watch in January described Japan’s record on asylum seekers as “abysmal”.

Unlike other industrialized nations, which have accepted or even encouraged immigration to refresh their labour force, Japan has remained unwelcoming, even though its shrinking, aging population is a key reason behind the economy’s slow growth.