Japan Press Weekly

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2015 September 16 - 29 [POLITICS]

Political parties except JCP accumulate 13 billion yen from public subsidies

Political parties other than the Japanese Communist Party have accumulated lots of money from their acceptance of public subsidies. This was revealed in the annual report on the use of party subsidies which the Internal Affairs Ministry published on September 25.

According to the report, 11 political parties, with the exception of the JCP, received public funds totaling 31.5 billion yen in 2014. As of the end of that year, the total amount of savings those political parties had accumulated from the subsidies reached 13 billion yen.

The ruling Liberal Democratic Party almost doubled its reserves of unused subsidies to 3.4 billion yen in 2014. The Komei Party, the LDP’s junior coalition partner, also increased its reserves by half from a year earlier, to about 1.5 billion yen. The main opposition Democratic Party of Japan has salted away some 7.1 billion yen from the grants, the largest amount among those political parties.

Around the end of every year, many political groups change their alignments with the aim of obtaining the government subsidies. The Internal Affairs Ministry on September 25 ordered the former Your Party, which disbanded in November last year after internal conflicts, to return its unspent subsidies of 826 million yen to the national treasury.

The JCP has consistently refused to accept the public funds since the grant system was introduced in 1995. The party argues that the subsidy system, which allows political parties to share taxpayer money regardless of voters’ political beliefs, goes against the Japanese Constitution which guarantees the freedom of thought and belief.

In January this year, the JCP submitted to the Diet a bill to repeal the political party grant system. Although the ordinary Diet session closed on September 25, the House of Representatives decided on the last day to carry the bill over to the next Diet session.

Past related article:
> State subsidy for political parties leads to misuse of public funds: tax news weekly [February 8, 2015]