Rikken Minseitō
The Rikken Minseitō ( Japanese. 立憲 民政党 , dt. About "Constitutional Democratic Party"), mostly abbreviated to Minseitō , was a political party founded in Japan in 1927 and next to the Rikken Seiyūkai one of two major parties of the immediate prewar period and the first War years.
The Minseitō was created in June 1927 through the merger of the Kenseikai of Wakatsuki Reijirō and the Seiyū Hontō of Tokonami Takejirō . Wakatsuki's first cabinet resigned in April 1927 after the Privy Council rejected his bank bailout plans ( Taiwan Bank ). His successor was Tanaka Giichi (Seiyūkai), who could not rely on a majority in the Shūgiin , the lower house of the Reichstag , since the Seiyūkai had crashed to 100 seats in the 1924 election . In order to bundle the opposition to Tanaka, Kenseikai and the Seiyū Hontō, which Tokonami had led from the Seiyūkai in 1924, joined forces. The party chairman ( sōsai ) was the former interior and finance minister Hamaguchi Osachi , general secretary the deputy Sakurauchi Yukio , Wakatsuki and Tokonami were two of four "advisors" ( komon ) on the party executive committee.
The Minseitō saw itself as liberal, relied primarily on urban voters and support from the economy. She pursued a focused on balancing foreign policy, according to Foreign Minister Kijūrō Shidehara named Shidehara diplomacy , in contrast to the more aggressive "Tanaka diplomacy" was.
In the general election in February 1928 , the two-party system that had arisen was confirmed: of the 466 seats, the Seiyūkai received 218, the Minseitō 216. In the same year, Tanaka came under pressure because of the expansion policy in China and had to go through the 1929 assassination attempt on Zhang Zuolin Resign Kanto Army . In July 1929 Hamaguchi was appointed Prime Minister. In new elections in February 1930 , the Minseitō won 273 seats and a clear majority in the Shūgiin. As a ruling party, the Minseitō supported the resumption of the "Shidehara diplomacy" and ratified the London Naval Treaty in 1930 against great domestic opposition . In terms of economic policy, Hamaguchi's austerity policy and the pegging of the yen to the gold standard had a devastating effect and intensified the effects of the global economic crisis .
In 1931 the cabinet of Hamaguchi, who was in poor health after the assassination, resigned, Wakatsuki became prime minister, but was no longer able to bring the domestic political situation under control. Beginning with the "Manchurian Incident" , the civil party politicians lost control of the country's fortunes, and in December 1931 the reign of the Minseitō ended with the resignation of Wakatsuki.
In the Shūgiin election in 1932 , the Minseitō fell back to 146 seats. And despite their support for the “Cabinets of National Unity” of Admiral Vizegraf Saitō Makoto and Admiral Okada Keisuke and compromises with the military, their influence waned. Under the chairmanship of Machida Chūji (provisional from 1934, chairman from 1935) in the pre-war elections of 1936 and 1937, it was again able to become the strongest party in the House of Commons, but it had nothing to counter the rise of the military.
In 1940 the Minseitō broke up and went up in the Taisei Yokusankai .
Many Minseitō politicians collaborated with the Taisei Yokusankai, which is why they were banned from office by the occupation authorities ( SCAP / GHQ ) after the end of the war in 1945 . In connection with the Minseitō, the Progressive Party of Japan , Nihon Shimpotō , was formed in 1945 under Machida's chairmanship, an indirect forerunner of the Liberal Democratic Party .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Janet Hunter (Ed.): Concise Dictionary of Modern Japanese History , University of California Press, Berkeley 1984, p. 131