The best thing about the new campaign manifesto of the Democratic Party of Japan (dpj) is not what it says but that it exists at all. Voters in post-war Japan have been denied much of a voice by one-party politics. But on July 27th the oppositionrndpj set out a "contract" with the electorate that it wants to be taken as a binding list of policies it will pursue if, as seems likely, the voters make history next month by breaking the Liberal Democratic Party's near-monopoly on power. Anyone who wants Japan to cast off its 20-year economic funk will welcome that. But the dpj will succeed only if its leaders also take the next, bolder step-and scrap the country's "iron triangle" of lobbies, political barons and bureaucrats.rnBarely a year ago the dpj looked unfit to lead Japan. Its domestic policies were incoherent and unfunded, its foreign policy worryingly anti-American, its members an odd coalition of socialists and exiles from the ldp. All it had done since winning control of the Diet's upper house in July 2007 had been to block the ldp. Its then leader, Ichiro Ozawa, secretly plotted to form a grand coalition with the ruling party, lamenting that his own lot "lacked credibility".
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