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58% find DPJ chief resignation over e-mail fuss unnecessary: poll+(Japan Economic Newswire Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)TOKYO, Feb. 26_(Kyodo) _ More than half of respondents in a Kyodo News poll said Democratic Party of Japan leader Seiji Maehara does not need to quit his post over the issue of the authenticity of an e-mail that a DPJ lawmaker claimed as evidence of a shady money transfer involving a senior ruling party official, the survey results showed Sunday. According to the nationwide telephone poll on Saturday and Sunday, 27.6 percent said Maehara should step down over the controversy caused by the e-mail issue while 58.7 percent said the opposition leader is accountable for the fuss but that there is no need for him to quit. The number of those who think Maehara has no responsibility came to 7.8 percent. The support rate for the DPJ plunged to 11.3 percent, down 5.7 points from the January survey and the lowest since October 2003, when the party merged with the Liberal Party. The latest survey covered 1,488 randomly selected, qualified voters. Of them, 1,027 responded. In a Diet session earlier this month, Hisayasu Nagata, a DPJ member of the House of Representatives, claimed he had obtained an e-mail showing that Takafumi Horie, the arrested founder of Livedoor Co. at the center of an alleged case of accounting fraud, instructed that 30 million yen be transferred to a son of Liberal Democratic Party Secretary General Tsutomu Takebe. But he has failed to prove the message was authentic. According to the survey, 37.6 percent said Nagata should resign as a Diet member while 22.9 percent replied he does not need to resign. The poll results also showed that 37.9 percent said they could not make comments at the moment on whether he should resign or not. The approval rating for Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's Cabinet, meanwhile, fell 1.1 points to 51.8 percent while the disapproval rating rose 2.9 points to 37.2 percent. Among those who supported Koizumi, the proportion of respondents who said they did so because there were no other appropriate people was the highest at 38.2 percent, up 8.0 points. In contrast, the ratios of those who supported Koizumi's Cabinet because of great expectations in administrative reforms and his leadership fell. Particularly, the proportion of respondents who have high expectations for Koizumi's foreign policy tumbled to 0.3 percent, down 3.1 points, apparently reflecting Japan's souring relations with China and South Korea over the prime minister's repeated visits to Tokyo's war-related Yasukuni Shrine. Among those who disapproved of the Cabinet, the portion of those who said they did so because they cannot expect any results from political reforms rose 7.0 points to 11.6 percent. The support rate for Koizumi's LDP was 46.3 percent, up 7.2 points, in sharp contrast with the fall in support for the DPJ. The support rates also came to 2.7 percent for the LDP's ruling coalition ally New Komeito party, down 1.9 points, to 3.1 percent for the Japanese Communist Party, down 0.5 point, and to 2.7 percent for the Social Democratic Party, down 0.3 point. |