Japan’s LDP May Share Committee Chair Posts With Opposition; Powerful Budget Committee Chair Under Consideration

The Yomiuri Shimbun

13:15 JST, November 7, 2024

The Liberal Democratic Party is putting the final touches on a plan to hand the influential post of House of Representatives Budget Committee chairperson to an opposition party member, The Yomiuri Shimbun has learned.

The chairperson presides over deliberations in the committee. The LDP’s move comes as opposition parties including the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan flex their muscles and demand more key posts following their hefty gains in last month’s lower house election. The chamber’s committees will each need a chairperson appointed for the special Diet session set to be convened Monday.

On Wednesday, the lower house held a meeting of a multiparty council as an alternative to the chamber’s Rules and Administration Committee, which does not presently exist because the house is dissolved. At this meeting, the LDP proposed that the lower house posts of speaker and committee chairs be allocated in a way similar to their allocation before the election. However, the opposition camp pushed back against this plan and blasted the LDP’s approach.

“All opposition parties flatly dismissed that suggestion. It’s out of the question,” CDPJ lower house member Yoichiro Aoyagi said to reporters after the meeting.

Although there are no rules stating that chairperson posts should be allocated based on how many seats a party holds, the opposition parties have put forward a proposal that would apportion these posts using the D’Hondt method. Under this method and based on the number of seats held by each party, the LDP would get eight posts, its ruling coalition partner, Komeito, would have one, and the opposition parties would receive eight.

The view that conceding some posts is unavoidable has spread through the ruling camp. The committee chairperson wields considerable authority over matters such as the holding of committee meetings and proceedings during these meetings. Relinquishing this post to the opposition side could give those parties influence over discussions on the draft budget and important legislation.

During the extraordinary Diet session convened in 2013 during the second administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the ruling parties gave up on passing a bill relating to reform of the national public servant system. This bill’s centerpiece was the establishment of a cabinet bureau of personnel affairs. A member of the then Democratic Party of Japan was chair of the House of Councillors Cabinet Committee that would discuss the bill, and the ruling parties decided to drop their plan due to expectations that these discussions would face heavy going.

“It will become more difficult to submit important legislation to committees that are headed by the opposition parties,” a senior LDP official said.