WHEN America faced the shutdown of its government in 1995, during a budgetary duel full of exaggerated theatrics, The Economist called it “Budget-bill kabuki”. Even as Washington might well reprise that routine on March 4th, this time the imported show is coming home.

A few hours before dawn on March 1st, Naoto Kan’s ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) passed a budget of sorts, despite an unprecedented revolt from 16 of its lawmakers, who abstained. But for the time being it is only a pale imitation of a budget; it sets out the 92 trillion yen ($1 trillion) the government plans to spend in the next fiscal year, but not the means of paying for it all. Winning support for the latter is so hard, Mr Kan has not yet tried.

This does not mean government will grind to a halt on April 1st. About 44% of spending is backed by taxes that can be renewed automatically. But the rest comes from borrowing, which needs approval either from a majority vote in the upper house, or a two-thirds majority in the lower house. The DPJ has neither, nor has it had any success in persuading the smaller opposition parties to vote with it. Opposition lawmakers are blasé: two whom I interviewed could hardly stop chuckling at Mr Kan’s predicament. They say that for several months into the next fiscal year the government can fund itself through existing tax revenues as well as by raising up to 20 trillion yen of short-term debt, which would avert an immediate budget crisis. In the meantime, they hope that Mr Kan’s popularity will sink so low as to force him into stepping down or annulling parliament as a condition for winning passage of the financing bills. They are preparing for such a showdown in the summer.

This is a dangerous game, however. It is not just government financing that is jeopardised by the political impasse; it is a DPJ child-benefit scheme that some families may be counting on; a long-overdue cut in corporate tax; as well as tax breaks for fishermen and farmers and tariff cuts on imported food and cigarettes. If the budget battle comes to look like it will further strain Japan’s fragile economic recovery, voters may blame the opposition’s intransigence as much as the ruling party’s ineptitude. 

To drive that message home, the DPJ has circulated to some of its opponents extracts from the 2003 autobiography of Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary, which recounts how the Republicans, in sabotaging the budget in 1995, ended up hurting themselves. Opposition politicians acknowledge that even as Mr Kan’s popularity fell to a measly 22% in a Nikkei poll this week, their parties did not reap the benefits. Nor was there widespread demand among those polled for Mr Kan to resign. Then on March 1st it became news when he notched up his 267th day in office: surpassing by a day that of Yukio Hatoyama, his predecessor. How weary voters have become of having leaders who fall like dominoes. 

Yoshimasa Hayashi of the opposition Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) admits that the latest gridlock may be aggravating voters’ disdain for the mainstream  parties. But he shrugged this off as an occasional feature of Japanese politics, something which tends to pass.

A novel side effect is that some fringe parties seem to be benefiting at the expense of the big ones. Last month we wrote about a tax-cutting party in Nagoya, one of Japan’s largest cities, which we referred to as a Japanese “tea party” movement. (Mr Hayashi mischievously called it a “sake party”, probably in allusion to its leaders’ self-confessed fondness for drink.) On March 3rd the Kyodo news agency reported that a first-term DPJ lawmaker had quit the ruling party to join the Nagoya tax-cutting party, led by her former boss, Takashi Kawamura. DPJ members who remain close to the party’s scandal-tainted former boss, Ichiro Ozawa, preferring him to Naoto Kan, are also reportedly getting closer to Mr Kawamura and his group. Some believe they could bring about a split in the ruling party.   

Mr Kan’s forces are bitterly divided, which is one reason the opposition feels confident it can drive him into a corner. Never mind if polls suggest that no party would come out of an election a big winner. The irony is that the LDP and other opposition parties, such as New Komeito, quietly concur with many of Mr Kan’s ideas about fiscal reform and free trade. (We, too, think they are good ones.) But such is the crass self-interest of many Japanese politicians that the opposition would rather bring down this government than work with it towards meaningful reform. No wonder the public is disenchanted.

(Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons)