Japan Communist Party Leading a Coalition?

After LDP's landslide victory in the last general elections, the opposition parties are having tough time vying the LDP-Komeito coalition regime. The Democratic Party, in particular, has a schism in its intra-party power structure and their setback in the last session of the Diet over the right of collective self-defense has cost the party a fatal loss in public support.

Misfortunes never come singly. Its overall presence visibly fading, the DP is being tapped on its shoulders by the Japan Communist Party, of all parties, for a possible coalition. A misfortune it is, indeed, for the middle-of-the-way to conservative members of the party to whom the communists are souls never to live within the same world.

The communists' wink is already stirring commotion in the power pendulum within the DP. The policy chief Hosono remarked on the communists' coalition proposal as preposterous and far from realistic; Chairman Koga of Rengo; the Japan Trade Union Confederation, called it "an awfully hard riddle to solve". Rengo is DP's largest supporting body. Koga added that a coalition should not allow for individual application by policy.

Party Chairman Okada is in favor of alignment with the Japan Communist Party, but there is a strong feeling of rejection within the party.
Meanwhile, the Japan Communist Party has nothing to lose by coming into some kind of cooperation with the DP as the party has no chance of singly taking initiatives. In fact, there is no substantial link between the DP and JCP except over the collective self-defense issue on which both stand tight against the ruling coalition government.

The single innocent stone thrown in by the JCP this time will inevitably trigger a fatal chain reaction within the DP leading to a decisive split. Whether or not that is what the JCP had in mind in the first place is a matter of speculation.

Depending on how to unriddle the problem the Democratic Party will risk its position as the leading party in the opposition.