Seiji Maehara

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Seiji Maehara (前原 誠司, Maehara Seiji, born 30 April 1962) is a Japanese politician who is the founder and leader of

Maehara married his wife Airi (愛里) in June 1995; they have no children. He likes to take photographs of trains as a hobby.

Early political career

Maehara won election to the Kyoto Prefectural Assembly in 1991 with the support of, among others, future Diet member Keiro Kitagami. At the time, he was the youngest prefectural assemblyman in Kyoto history.

He was elected to the House of Representatives as a member of the

As a member of the DPJ he focused on security affairs and often negotiated with the government. In the shadow governments he has served as the Shadow Minister for Security Affairs and Shadow Minister for the Defense Agency.

Term as DPJ President

After the crushing defeat of the DPJ in the 2005 snap election and the resignation of DPJ leader Katsuya Okada, the elected representatives of the party met to choose a new leader. The two candidates were Naoto Kan and Maehara. Maehara defeated the 58-year-old Kan by a razor-thin count of 96–94 in open balloting by party members from both Houses of the Diet, with two members abstaining and two others having cast invalid votes. Maehara was appointed DPJ president on 17 September 2005.

However, Maehara's term as party leader was short lived. Although he initially led the party's criticism of the Koizumi administration, particularly in regards to connections between LDP lawmakers and scandal-ridden Livedoor, the revelation that a fake email was used to try to establish this link greatly damaged his credibility. The scandal led to the resignation of Representative Hisayasu Nagata and of Maehara as party leader on 31 March. New elections for party leader were held on 7 April, in which Ichirō Ozawa was elected president.

Cabinet

In the 2009 Japanese general election, the Democratic Party won a two-thirds majority of the House of Representatives, allowing the party to form a new government.

Minister of Land, Infrastructure and Transport

Maehara was appointed Minister of Land, Infrastructure and Transport on 16 September 2009. In this role, he was the spokesman for a number of government initiatives, including:

• Cessation of construction work on
  Yamba Dam
• Opening Haneda Airport in Tokyo to long-haul international flights
• Bankruptcy restructuring of Japan Airlines
• Experimentation with reducing or eliminating tolls on the Japanese expressway network

Minister of Foreign Affairs

Then Prime Minister

Following Kan's announced resignation in August 2011, Maehara initially planned to support Finance Minister Yoshihiko Noda, but broke off this support due to disagreement over whether to raise the consumption tax, and declared his own candidacy for the presidency of the DPJ on 22 August.^[17] He lost to Noda and Economy Minister Banri Kaieda in the first round of balloting on 29 August.

Second stint as leader of the Democratic Party

In 2016, the DPJ merged with

Renho resigned in July 2017 after the DP suffered a bad result in the 2017 Tokyo assembly elections.^[19] A leadership election was immediately held to select the new leader of the party. Maehara was one of the candidates contesting the election, along with former Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano. Through his reliable support from conservative DP and former JIP members, Maehara comfortably won the leadership election with 60% of the points up for grabs.^[20] He returned as the leader of the largest opposition party almost 12 years after ascending to the post for the first time.

Maehara's second stint as president was short and rocky. One of his first acts as the new president was to appoint rising-star lawmaker

Abe called a snap election less than three weeks to Maehara's ascension to the presidency. This threw the party into disarray, as it had not completed preparing its election platform. At the same day as Abe's election declaration, Koike finally launched a new party called Kibō no Tō (Party of Hope). Seeing Koike's high popularity at that time as a potential asset, Maehara coordinated with Koike on DP candidates' nominations for the election. Koike agreed to endorse DP candidates and Maehara effectively disbanded the party in order to allow the candidates run under the Kibō banner. However, despite Maehara's request, Koike imposed an ideological filter that effectively barred liberal-leaning members of the DP, such as Yukio Edano, from joining Kibō. This led Edano to form the Constitutional Democratic Party less than three weeks before election to house liberal DP members.^[22] Maehara himself ran as independent.

Koike's multiple blunders during the campaign led Kibō to fall well short of high initial expectations, becoming the second largest opposition party behind the Edano-led CDP. Maehara, whose political gamble had backfired, was under heavy pressure to resign from his position as DP president. Maehara resigned from his post and from the party on 28 October 2017, ending his tumultuous second term as leader of the Democratic Party.^[23]

DPP and FEFA

Maehara joined Kibō in November 2017.^[24] When Kibō merged with the Democratic Party in May 2018 to form the Democratic Party for the People, Maehara also joined the DPP.^[25] He became critical of party leader Yuichiro Tamaki and his approach of collaborating with the LDP, and challenged Tamaki for the DPP leadership spot in 2023, claiming that he would focus on forming a collaborative front with other opposition parties outside of the JCP.^[26][27][28] Following his defeat to Tamaki, he and several other DPP parliamentarians, including former Governor Yukiko Kada, split from the group to form Free Education for All. The new party is believed to be focused on building an opposition coalition, but several difficulties have come up, including the closeness of Maehara to Nippon Ishin no Kai, to which a RENGO spokesman said that the Union would be forced to pull support from the new party if it is "swallowed up by Nippon Ishin".^[29]

References