Tokyo, June 2 (DPA) Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama announced Wednesday that he would step down after eight months in office as his party prepares for a July election amid a steady decline in approval ratings for his government.
The plunge in support for his cabinet came after he reneged on a campaign promise to move a US military base from Okinawa. Hatoyama also faced mounting calls to resign from within his own Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ).
Hatoyama, Japan’s fourth premier in four years, told a DPJ general assembly he was resigning because of the departure of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) from the governing coalition. It walked out Sunday after Hatoyama decided to keep the US base on the southern Japanese island.
Hatoyama also asked Ichiro Ozawa, the powerful secretary general of the party, to resign. Hatoyama said Ozawa accepted the request.
The DPJ is to hold a general meeting Friday to decide on the next leader. The selection was tantamount to picking a prime minister because the DPJ has a majority in the Diet’s lower house, which chooses the prime minister.
Many DPJ lawmakers contesting next month’s upper house election wanted Hatoyama to step down, news media reported. Some party leaders suggested that the DPJ would suffer a crushing election defeat if the situation went unchanged.
The situation was a turnaround from the popularity the government enjoyed when it took office in September after the DPJ won a landslide victory in the August general election and ended more than a half-century of almost uninterrupted rule by the Liberal Democratic Party.
The latest opinion survey by the Kyodo News agency showed more than half of those polled wanted Hatoyama to resign and the approval rating for his cabinet fell below 20 percent for the first time since he took office, when the rating stood at 72 percent.
Before last year’s election, Hatoyama, who pledged to develop an equal partnership with the United States, Japan’s top ally, told Okinawans repeatedly that he would not let another US military base be built on their island, but last week, his government agreed to a US request to relocate a base there to a less-populated area of Okinawa despite local opposition.
The SDP then decided to leave the three-party governing coalition. Its decision came after Hatoyama on Friday dismissed Mizuho Fukushima, the SDP leader, as minister of consumer affairs and gender equality, after she refused to approve an agreement over the
relocation of the US base.
