安倍即將被選為日本首相，在小泉的改革下，自民黨努力擺脫派系，依小泉的說法「破壞」自民黨，現在自民黨從新團結，不僅在組織上，也在施政哲學上，小泉成功的將之整合。現在該黨更中央化，更少貪腐，但是能否更有效回應選民的需求，仍待加強。現在，大家都注目安倍在小泉的傳承上，能否繼續其路線？能否如小泉般跳過派系頭頭訴諸民眾，還是會回到舊路上。

現在的確是較少政治金錢在流動，但一方面也因為經濟不景氣的關係。但是隨著經濟回升，安倍要應付政府、地方黨部、各選區等的壓力。不過在小泉上任之際，派系金權政治就已示微，人民厭倦經常不斷的金權政治醜聞，無論合法不合法。單一選區也對掃除地方金權政治有點用。小泉更進一步以政策來面對選民，跳過自民黨內部的政策研究委員會，通常這個委員會只是拿政策來包裝利益的分配而己。另外，小泉在指定內閣時更刻意跳脫派系思考。他不諱言，他的目的就是要打擊派系，中央集權化。但是，小泉也冒著玩火的危險。他雖然設下其優先目標，但是沒有改善組織內部，這些一直是日本改革的扮腳石。

安倍支持小泉的改革，但是現在他的任務更複雜。他可以利用小泉強化的中央權力，也可以向舊勢力求援。他應該致力於讓黨內更民主。

Japan’s political factions tested
By Patrick L. Smith International Herald Tribune

Published: September 4, 2006

　　Sometime before the governing Liberal Democratic Party votes for a new leader on Sept. 20 and then elects him the next Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, the all-but-certain victor, will take a curious step: He plans to resign from the party faction with which he has long been identified, according to political associates.

Even a few years ago, such a move would have been unthinkable. A candidate for high office in the party would have gathered his faction about him like a Roman emperor marshaling the Praetorian Guard.

Then a many-sided civil war would have ensued within an organization that, as an old adage had it, was neither liberal nor democratic nor a party.

But Abe appears intent on sending a clear message not only to party members, but also to the Japanese public: If he succeeds Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan, he will continue Koizumi’s high-profile effort to reinvent what was long viewed as a corrupt machine within which money, patronage and factional rivalries counted for practically everything. Within this system, perspectives on policy - in those uncommon cases when a party member had one - were beside the point.

In several respects, Koizumi has met the goal he announced during his first campaign to become prime minister in 2001: He has, in effect, "destroyed" the Liberal Democratic Party, as he famously promised voters he would.

"Until now the Liberal Democrats were a kind of collective - many small

parties within a party," Tsutomu Takebe, the party’s secretary general, said in an interview. "Now we’re unified in both organization and philosophy. Koizumi’s reforms have integrated us."

But Koizumi leaves behind numerous questions. The party is now more centralized and less corrupt, but is it any more effective? Is it now capable of responding to an increasingly sophisticated electorate, so acting as an agent of change instead of a bulwark against it?

Above all, what will Abe do with his political inheritance? Koizumi dealt factions critical blows, but most are still in place. Lacking Koizumi’s gift for talking to voters above the heads of faction leaders, will Abe fall back on the old apparatus?

Equally, there is far less political money now circulating through the party, but it drained away during a prolonged recession, when there simply was not a lot of slush to go around. How will Abe cope with what analysts and party officials say is the mixed blessing of returned prosperity?

"It’s too early to tell how Abe will run the party," said Michael Cucek, an analyst at Okamoto Associates, a Tokyo political consultancy and a commentator on Japanese politics. "Given that the pie is no longer shrinking, his chief challenge will be to say ’no’ to pet projects from the ministries, to local party organizations and to representatives from districts like his own."

The governing party’s factions, long recognized as an unhealthy feature of the Japanese system, were already in decline when Koizumi took office five years ago. In part their influence was legislated away in response to mounting public disgust with nonstop scandals involving "money politics," as the Japanese termed the circulation of funds - legally and illegally - through the factions and onto party members and their districts.

A switch from multi-seat to single- seat election districts in the mid-1990s cost the Liberal Democrats’ factions, several of which would typically field candidates in the same district, one of their primary functions. Campaign finance laws and public funding of political campaigns subsequently cost faction leaders another key source of power: the distribution of money to members standing for election.

Koizumi then did further damage. First, he took direct control of policy, sidestepping the party’s Policy Research Council, which had long served to dress up the factions’ political preferences so that pork-barreling and patronage appeared publicly as considered policy.

He also pointedly ignored the factions in naming his cabinet, so depriving them of the only important purpose left to them.

Koizumi has long made plain his purpose in attacking factions and

centralizing power in his office. He said he was as repelled by machine politics as any voter; equally, he said he wanted to push through a radical agenda that would meet stiff resistance if left to the party’s machinations.

But to an extent Koizumi has fought fire with fire. As a consequence,

he has advanced his priorities, but he has not improved an organization whose political underdevelopment has long been an impediment to change in Japan.

Among Koizumi’s primary adversaries was the faction passed down from Kakuei Tanaka, the noted "kingmaker" who, in the 1970s, turned money

politics from a cancer on the system into the system itself. In four general elections during Koizumi’s five years in office, the old Tanaka faction lost more than a quarter of its members while

Koizumi’s faction - and Abe’s - grew by more than 40 percent.

"Koizumi chose the candidates he liked in these elections," said

Koichi Kato, a longtime Liberal Democratic member of the Japanese Parliament’s lower

house. "When they won they naturally entered the faction that helped them."

Equally, Koizumi won party backing for his agenda in part by declaring, in the manner of President George W. Bush, that all

Liberal Democrats would stand either for or against him. Given that opposition within the party now roils beneath the surface, the unity of which Takebe speaks appears to rest primarily upon a desire among members in Parliament to keep their seats - the glue that has always held the

party together.

"Koizumi’s way is all ’anti’ something - anti-bureaucracy, anti-factions, anti-old guard," said Jun Iio, professor of government at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, in Tokyo. "As a

challenger he goes far; as a builder of a new system he has little to show."

Abe’s intention to resign from his faction, party officials stressed,

will be to avoid faction-to-faction head counts and encourage open debate within the party. If that is truly his desire he will have no trouble: Abe will inherit a party that is more deeply divided than it was when factions ruled.

But it is also a party that appears even less capable of productive debate than it was when Koizumi was elected. In these respects, Koizumi may have destroyed the Liberal Democratic Party in ways he did not intend.

While Abe supports Koizumi’s national policies for change, his task will be far more complex. Koizumi advanced a sweeping plan in broad outline. Abe will have to negotiate his predecessor’s blueprint if he is to win political acceptance from a disillusioned electorate and a restive party.

Facing this challenge leaves Abe with a simple choice, according to observers within and outside the party. He can make better use of the power that Koizumi centralized or he can revert to the system Koizumi sought, however imperfectly, to defeat.

Given his conservatism, Abe is unlikely to make the governing party any more liberal. His opportunity lies in making it more

democratic - and more of a party.