'No Decision' About Japan Navy To Hormuz As Takaichi Wins Budget

The Democratic Party for the People (DPFP), after its offer to support the budget if the government scheduled the vote for next week was rejected by the ruling parties, opposed it. DPFP leader Yuichiro Tamaki said that the government was prioritiizing its“honor” – fulfilling a commitment to pass the budget before the end of the fiscal year – instead of pausing to acknowledge changing conditions and preparing a provisional budget that could address the situation in the Middle East while the Diet deliberated on the general budget at its ordinary pace.

Centrist Reform Alliance (CRA) leader Junya Ogawa, meanwhile, urged the government to take a humbler stance in its management of the legislature. Team Mirai, which had once hinted at the possibility of supporting the budget, joined with the CRA to file the dismissal motion against budget committee chair Tetsushi Sakamoto and voted against the budget.

Despite lacking a majority in the upper house, the government is determined to press on and pass the budget before March 31, ignoring warnings from LDP officials that its approach in the lower house could not only jeopardize the budget in the upper house but complicate the legislative process beyond the budget.

Without a majority and with at most ten days of legislative business before the end of the fiscal year, the government has virtually no margin for error – and by not preparing a provisional budget, the government is going into the upper house deliberations next week with little room to compromise. Any delay will force a scramble to assemble a provisional budget. That would reflect poorly on the prime minister.

The LDP and the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP) agreed Friday that debate would begin on Monday, March 16, but there are major questions hanging over upper house deliberations. Generally, the House of Councillors spends less time than the lower house – approximately 70%-80% as many hours – but with the lower house spending a historically short amount of time the opposition does not find that standard appropriate and wants at least sixty hours of deliberations.

For some budget-related bills – though not the budget itself – the government will also have to grapple with committees controlled by the CDP. The government's best chance of succeeding is, of course, convincing an opposition party to support the budget, but after the process of moving it through the lower house there may not be an easy pathway to finding a partner among the opposition parties.

With the budget passed by the lower house, it will take effect on April 11 even if the upper house were to block it entirely; for the same reason, however, because Takaichi made passing the budget by March 31 a mark of her authority, she has given the opposition parties ample reason to resist in the upper house, particularly now that they want revenge for her disregard for parliamentary norms.

During the final round of questioning in the budget committee Friday, Prime Minister Takaichi said that“nothing has been decided” regarding the dispatch of Self-Defense Forces (SDF) ships to escort vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. She said that she intended to explain Japan's position on the Middle East directly to US President Donald Trump in their summit on March 19.