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Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said Monday he will consider reshuffling the cabinet and his party's leadership after the end of the special parliament session being arranged to start on Sept. 21, with a view to promoting his potential successors to those posts.
Koizumi, in a press conference following his Liberal Democratic Party's landslide victory in Sunday's general election, urged the hopefuls, without naming them, to begin preparing themselves to be the next premier, again ruling out staying in office beyond September next year.
Koizumi plans to retain his current cabinet lineup until the end of the session, during which the ruling bloc hopes to pass bills to privatize Japan Post in about two weeks.
Koizumi is believed to have judged that the current cabinet will be better at handling parliamentary debate on the bills than a reshuffled cabinet.
Koizumi is certain to be reelected as prime minister in the special parliament session to follow the election.
His party's overwhelming victory has prompted calls for extending his term as LDP president, which expires next September, and allows him to serve longer as premier despite his repeated denial.
"There are many aspirants for LDP president and prime minister," Koizumi said. "I want to give those people opportunities to play an active role as much as possible."
Koizumi also said he wants his successor to further advance there form that the Koizumi Cabinet has promoted with passion.
He reiterated that he wants to resubmit the postal bills – the centerpiece of his policy agenda -- to the special parliament session and expressed hope that the session would run short.
The LDP captured 296 seats, the second-largest figure in its 50-year history and well up from the 212 held before the election. Along with its coalition partner, the New Komeito party, the ruling camp took 327 seats, more than two-thirds of the 480-seat House of Representatives.
Investors welcomed the results, pushing Tokyo shares higher, with key stock indexes finishing the day at fresh four-year highs.
The largest opposition Democratic Party of Japan, meanwhile, decided Monday to elect a successor to its leader Katsuya Okada, who announced early Monday he will resign as DPJ president over his party's crushing defeat.
The DPJ, which had 177 seats before the election, lost 64 seats, leaving it with 113. It was the first setback for the party since it was established in 1996.
Being hard-hit particularly by the humiliating defeats in most urban constituencies that had been its strongholds, opinions are divided among DPJ members on whether to reinstall such heavyweights as former presidents Naoto Kan and Yukio Hatoyama, and Vice President Ichiro Ozawa, or promote a younger leader.
The LDP and the New Komeito party separately agreed Monday to keep their ruling coalition intact and Koizumi in power, and to seek to convene the special parliament session on Sept. 21.
Koizumi and New Komeito leader Takenori Kanzaki signed an accord on seven priority policy issues, including plans to oppose a tax increase exclusively targeting corporate employees and put more efforts into diplomacy with Asia.
Some coalition members said the bloc is considering starting deliberations on the postal bills in the upper chamber before the lower house, but LDP Secretary General Tsutomu Takebe denied the possibility.
The ruling camp's hold of more than a two-thirds majority is enough to enact the bills even if the upper chamber again rejects them.
Koizumi dissolved the lower house on Aug. 8 to call the election after the postal privatization bills failed to clear the parliament, with a larger-than-expected number of LDP members in the upper house joining the opposition in voting against them.
Voter turnout in the 44th lower house election was 67.51 percent in the constituencies and 67.46 percent in the proportional representation section, both up 7.65 percentage points from the previous lower house election in November 2003.
The turnout in the constituencies was the highest since the 73.31 percent registered in 1990.
About 103.36 million people were eligible to choose from 1,131 candidates in the 300 single-seat constituencies and the 180-seat proportional representation sector divided into 11 blocks.
(Xinhua News Agency September 13, 2005)
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