The New Party Sakigake (新党さきがけ Shintō Sakigake or The Forerunner) was a Japanese political party that broke away from the Liberal Democratic Party on June 22, 1993. The party was created by Masayoshi Takemura. The party, was a centrist party, and it had many reformist and even moderate ecological elements. The theoretical reader was Shusei Tanaka. Yukio Hatoyama and Naoto Kan also took part but later moved to the Democratic Party of Japan.
After the general election of 1993, Sakigake joined a Cabinet led by Morihiro Hosokawa. It was the first government without the LDP since 1955. Sakigake's Masayoshi Takemura became Minister. Sakigake supported the following Tsutomu Hata Cabinet, but didn't join the Cabinet.
In 1994, New Party Sakigake took part in the government of Murayama Tomiichi, a government coalition of the Liberal Democrats and the Japan Socialist Party, which replaced the liberal coalition headed the previous year by the Japan Renewal Party.
In 1997, the New Party Sakigake had two members in the House of Representatives and three members in the House of Councillors, which was good for them, especially after the LDP became the ruling party again. However, it decided to moderate its stance, and, because of the power of the ecologist and reformist factions, the conservatives decided to reform the party.
Thus, in 1998, the party changed its name to The Sakigake Party. In 2002, the party again changed its name to Midori no kaigi, the Environmental Green Political Assembly, which itself dissolved on June 22, 2004, mainly because of the failure of the party to win any seats in that year's elections – thus spelling the end to the Sakigake movement in Japanese politics.
The party gained its followers mainly from white collar bureaucrats and ecologists. It was a conservative reformist party with ecological elements.
Famous quotes containing the word party:
“He said, truly, that the reason why such greatly superior numbers quailed before him was, as one of his prisoners confessed, because they lacked a cause,—a kind of armor which he and his party never lacked. When the time came, few men were found willing to lay down their lives in defense of what they knew to be wrong; they did not like that this should be their last act in this world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)