Koike’s Party of Hope relying on Democratic Party funds for poll

October 9, 2017

TOKYO- Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike's fledgling national political party has co-opted candidates for the upcoming general election from the Democratic Party and, along with them, taken in government subsidies paid to the splintering DP.

The flows of public funds to the Party of Hope have come under criticism from officials of the ruling bloc led by the Liberal Democratic Party, who called for the subsidies to be returned to government coffers.

The DP, the largest opposition party before the House of Representatives was dissolved in late September for an election this month, has distributed 20 million yen each to members who were lawmakers in the Lower House until the dissolution to help their candidacies in the election on the DP ticket.

The party has also doled out 15 million yen each to other former Lower House lawmakers and first-timers it planned to field in the election.

For the endorsement fund allotments, the DP used some of its internal reserves totaling nearly 15 billion yen, consisting mainly of government subsidies.

The DP has effectively decided to break up by agreeing to a de facto merger with the Party of Hope, aiming to assemble a political force that can topple the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Many DP members plan to run in the Oct. 22 Lower House election as candidates of the Koike-led party.

The Party of Hope, launched amid high interest just before the Lower House dissolution, is said to lack campaign funds and requested fund contributions from candidate hopefuls in exchange for the party's official endorsement for the election.

Koike's party demanded that those running in single-seat constituencies on the party's ticket with their names also put on its regional proportional representation lists contribute at least one million yen each to the party, in addition to the mandatory 6 million yen in candidacy deposits to be paid to the state.

An official of the party said it has no plans to get funds from another political party, but the reality is that it is effectively siphoning off DP funds by election candidates switching party affiliations.

Every year, a total of about 31 billion yen in subsidies is paid to political parties according to the number of their national lawmakers and other factors. To eligible for the subsidies, parties need to register with the government in January or after elections for the Lower House or the House of Councillors, the upper chamber.

Government funding is not yet available to the Party of Hope and the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, which was formed recently by liberal defectors from the DP.

"The party has no operating funds," said a former DP Lower House lawmaker planning to join the Party of Hope. "When in the DP, I received funds after being endorsed as an election candidate. In the Party of Hope, by contrast, I have to pay."

The Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, led by former Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano, is in a similar financial position to the Party of Hope.

Edano has obtained the agreement of DP President Seiji Maehara that DP members will not be required to return the money they received from the party even if they shift to Edano's party.

No legal limits are set on how subsidies to political parties are used. But an LDP official is critical about the way DP funds are being used, saying, "Distributing money to members defecting to other parties would amount to an act circumventing the law or a breach of trust."

At a news conference last week, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga suggested that the right course of action for the DP would be to return the subsidies to government coffers. He noted that small opposition Your Party paid back money to the state when it disbanded in 2014. Jiji Press