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Voting closes in Japan election
Overwhelming victory for Koizumi's LDP: exit polls
9/12/2005
 

          TOKYO, Sept 11 (AFP): Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi won an overwhelming victory Sunday with his Liberal Democrats able to rule without a coalition partner for the first time in 15 years, exit polls said.
Earlier report adds: Polling stations in Japan closed Sunday at 1100 GMT in an election Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi called as a referendum on his economic reforms.
Media exit polls were due out soon afterwards, although official results were not expected until later.
Turnout two hours before polls closed was 50 per cent, slightly up from 47.4 per cent at the same stage in the last election in 2003.
Opinion surveys ahead of voting put Koizumi strongly ahead in the election, which he called two years ahead of schedule after rebels in his Liberal Democratic Party defeated his signature plan to privatize the post office.
Another report adds: Japan Post, the trigger for Sunday's snap election, does far more than just deliver letters. It is the world's largest financial institution and has been entrenched in national life for more than a century.
People turn to its 25,000 branches nationwide not only for mail and parcel deliveries but also for savings and life insurance and, in small towns, the sort of personal attention disappearing in big cities.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has campaigned to privatise Japan Post for years. He called the election after parliament defeated the plan, which he has cast as a litmus test for whether lawmakers support reform.
Japan Post's financial assets total more than three trillion dollars, far more than any bank in the world. As of the end of the last fiscal year it had 261,940 employees -- 8,760 more than Japan's military -- with postal workers even stationed at nursing homes, hospitals and around 70 resort inns.
Koizumi believes breaking up the post office would give the private sector reason to compete in now monopolized sectors, stirring economic growth. As postal assets are largely invested in bonds, privatization would also cut off a source of funding for wasteful public projects, he argues.
But his privatisation campaign puts him in a head-to-head confrontation with some of the strongest supporters of his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).
Analysts say this is no accident as Koizumi, the longest serving premier in a generation, has staked his legacy on reforming the long-dominant LDP.
The post office was established in 1871, three years after Japan began a modernization drive after centuries of isolation, to let small savers store their money in a public institution and not have to pay any tax on interest.
As a result, the Japan Post has formed a close nexus with the powerful. Local postmaster jobs are often passed from father to son, forming a base of small-town leaders who had been reliable LDP vote mobilisers.

 

 
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