Photo/Illutration Jun Azumi, chairman of the Diet Affairs Committee of the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, speaks at a meeting of the party’s team to investigate the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s political funds scandal on Dec. 14. (Minoru Satomi)

The Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan is trying to use the money scandal embroiling the ruling Liberal Democratic Party as political ammunition, but the main opposition party has been firing blanks so far.

The funding scandal has led to resignations from the Cabinet, a further decline in the approval ratings for the Kishida administration and an intensifying investigation by Tokyo prosecutors.

The CDP and other opposition parties, however, have failed to capitalize on the LDP’s predicament, opinion polls show.

The CDP last week set up a team to investigate the scandal centered around revenues from fund-raising parties that LDP factions apparently kept off the books.

At a meeting of the team on Dec. 18, Akira Nagatsuma, chairman of the CDP’s Policy Research Committee, emphasized the need to carry out political reforms.

“(The scandal shows) politicians play dirty in money matters. We want to make sure that this kind of problem never erupts again,” Nagatsuma said.

During the ordinary Diet session next year, the CDP plans to realize such measures as banning donations from companies and organizations to political parties and making it easier to view income and expenditure entries in political fund reports online.

The Abe faction, the largest in the LDP, is suspected of failing to report about 500 million yen ($3.5 million) in revenues gained from fund-raising parties over the past five years.

The money was distributed to member lawmakers, who also failed to report the funds as income in their organizations’ political fund reports, investigative sources said.

According to the sources, secretaries to some of these lawmakers said they were told by the Abe faction’s secretariat that they do not need to report the funds because the money constituted “policy activity expenses.”

Policy activity expenses are donations from political parties (not factions) to individual lawmakers, and the money does not have to be reported by the recipients.

The CDP plans to close that “loophole” in the Political Fund Control Law by requiring the listing of policy activity expenses in fund reports, party sources said.

However, some CDP lawmakers are concerned that political discussions on institutional reforms may steal the spotlight from efforts to ascertain the full extent of the money scandal in the LDP.

“When a traffic accident occurs, an on-the-spot inspection needs to be done (first),” said CDP President Kenta Izumi.

Another senior party official said, “If the ruling coalition comes up with measures to prevent a recurrence, they are nothing but a red herring.”

The scandal is the biggest to hit the LDP during the reign of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, which started in October 2021.

Voters again appear fed up with money-in-politics issues in the LDP.

According to an Asahi Shimbun survey conducted Dec. 16-17, the LDP’s support rating fell to 23 percent from 27 percent in the previous survey in November. It is the lowest level since the LDP returned to power in December 2012.

But the CDP’s support rating was 5 percent, unchanged from the November survey.

An overwhelming 78 percent of survey respondents said they cannot expect the opposition to be a counterbalancing force to the LDP, compared with just 15 percent who said they can.

“It is difficult to have a full-fledged discussion until the whole picture of the scandal is put together through prosecutors’ investigations,” a member of the CDP’s investigation team said. “We are now making ourselves look like we are tackling the problem.”

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