Japanese Prime Minister survives with offer to quit once crisis overcome

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan on Thursday survived a no-confidence vote by offering to resign once he has overcome the worst of the country's nuclear crisis, a last-minute deal with ruling party rebels who had threatened to oust him from office. Kan's offer to step down buys him time to prepare an extra budget to fund the rebuilding cost of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, but does little to resolve the country's long-running political and policy paralysis.
Thanks to Kan's manoeuvring, the parliamentary no-confidence motion - brought by the opposition over his handling of the country's deepest crisis since World War Two - was comfortably defeated by 293 to 152 votes. Yet, weakened by rifts within his own party, Kan may be seen as a lame duck by the opposition and have little luck with tax and social security reforms, which Japan badly needs to contain its bulging debt and which require opposition backing in a divided parliament.
A No 2 in the biggest opposition party, the Liberal Democratic Party, made plain it had no intention to make things any easier for the ruling Democrats despite Kan's offer. "We plan to carry forward while holding a strong belief that the continuation of the Kan government is not good for the country or for the people," Secretary General Nobuteru Ishihara told reporters.
He restated his party's position that it would block a bill needed to finance 44 percent of this fiscal year's $1 trillion budget unless the Democrats ditched their spending promises. Kan, who took office almost exactly a year ago as Japan's fifth minister in as many years, is battling to control a radiation crisis at the Fukushima plant which was knocked out by the tsunami.
He also needs to come up with a plan to pay for rebuilding the tsunami-hit region north of Tokyo without allowing debt, already twice the size of the $5 trillion economy to spin out of control. Major rating agencies have warned Japan in the past several weeks it risked credit downgrades if a policy deadlock made it impossible to tackle the nation's ills: economic stagnation, ballooning debt and rising social security costs in a fast ageing and shrinking population.
A government panel on Thursday recommended doubling the sales tax to 10 percent over the next four years and raising the retirement age to avert a financial meltdown, but it is far from clear if and when the plan can be implemented. Speaking shortly before the vote, Kan told ruling Democratic Party of Japan lawmakers he would step down later. "I would like for the younger generation to take over various responsibilities once I fulfil certain roles that I need to, as I work on handling the disaster," a solemn Kan told the gathering. He gave no date, and there were already signs of bickering in his party over when he should go.