Akio Okawara

Executive Director
Sumitomo Shoji Research Institute, Inc.

Here we are in June already, and the temperature in Tokyo is rising, making our commutes feel stickier. Meanwhile, the quadrennial World Cup soccer tournament will soon kick off in South Africa, with the feverish competition continuing for a month starting June 11.

The big news in Japan at the moment is the resignation of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama. He is the fourth Japanese leader in a row to step down after a year or less in power. Needless to say, this sort of shakiness in the government has a major impact on the economy, which is now depending on policy measures to power the recovery from the Lehman shock. I believe no other major country has experienced such a rapid turnover at the top. This calls into question the shape of Japan's national governance, and it is liable to aggravate the lack of public trust in the political system.

Japan is not the only country where mistrust of politics is on the rise. Changes are occurring even in the United States and Britain, the representative practitioners of two-party politics. In the United States, dissatisfaction with both the Democratic and Republican parties has been fueling the rise of a third force, the so-called tea party movement, which advocates small government, lower taxes, and reduction of the budget deficit. In Britain, meanwhile, the recent general election produced the first coalition government in 70 years. The last one was the government of national unity during World War II, headed by Winston Churchill from 1940 to 1945.

Churchill famously remarked, "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." The word democracy is from the Greek demos (people) and kratia (rule). And the idea of government representing the will of the people is a legacy of ancient Greece. Contemporary democracy is conducted principally through elected representatives, and political parties are commonly the instruments through which the popular will is aggregated and reflected in politics. But now, with the rapid progress of globalization and the dramatic social changes that are leading to greater diversity of opinion, it has become difficult for the established parties to keep up with the changing situation and adequately represent people's wishes; this has contributed to growth in the ranks of independent voters. In the recent election in Britain, the Liberal Democrats won 23% of the popular vote, but they ended up with fewer than 9% of the seats in Parliament. This discrepancy has led to calls for electoral reform. Though the details of the situation differ from country to country, there is a common need to establish a set of arrangements better suited to the circumstances of the twenty-first century.

The global economy has been greatly shaken by the euro crisis, but the situation in Greece, whose debt problems set it off, seems to have been stabilized for the time being thanks to help from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. The support, however, is conditioned on the implementation of harsh austerity measures. Will the Greek people, whose forebears created democracy in ancient times, have the wisdom required to cope with this situation under their contemporary democratic government? The answer will have a major bearing on the future of the entire euro zone.