Yukio Hatoyama has quit as Japan’s prime minister, but doesn’t want to give up his Twitter following
BECOMING PRIME minister is the pinnacle of any political career, and when former Japanese prime minister Yukio Hatoyama did just that last September, it was the culmination of a long-held ambition to unseat the Liberal Democratic Party, which had reigned for more than 50 years.
Hatoyama’s abrupt resignation on Wednesday, after just eight months in power, was presumably a crushing blow for the veteran politician. But it seems that Hatoyama had more pressing concerns gnawing at him. In a tweet following his resignation, he wrote “I announced my intention to resign as prime minister today, in order to make the Democratic Party clean again for the sake of the people. From now on I will stop being PM but want to continue to tweet as a normal person.” So far, so reasonable, but then the clincher, the window into his enormous sense of regret: “Please keep following me. . .”
All political careers end in failure, of course, but now it appears political failure is measured not in the number of seats you hold but in the number of followers you have on Twitter (674,557 in Hatoyama’s case). Political resignations differ markedly from country to country – the German president, Horst Köhler, resigned this week for making inappropriately bellicose comments, by modern German standards, at least, while Scandinavian leaders probably avoid jaywalking for fear of a career-ending scandal erupting. Hatoyama’s immediate reason for resigning was because he failed to fulfill a campaign pledge to move the US military base off Okinawa.
But what does Hatoyama’s needy “Please keep following me. . .” tweet say about the allure of social networking, the false intimacy of Twitter, and the incompatibility of those attractions with the responsibility of public office? His embrace of Twitter was seen as a sign of his desire to change Japanese politics and further democratise the process of government. While there are few better tools for quickly disseminating information, it’s hard now not to see his accumulation of Twitter followers in a different light.
The neediness that characterises the average politician, that overwhelming quest for public approval, is echoed in the neediness of the rapacious social networker, constantly comparing followers or friends as an artificial measure of self-worth. Despite the process of electioneering, politics should be about more than courting popularity. Once they have won the confidence of their electorate, politicians need to actually govern. It is one thing for Ashton Kutcher to rack up followers with an inane stream of consciousness, but for a politician, whose every word carries real significance, the temptation to craft public policy in crowd-pleasing 140-character tweets is fraught with difficulty.
For all the concern raised about Dan Boyle’s tweets, they feel like the attempts of a politician trying to cut through the spin of the communication departments that manage the flow of information out of government, rather than of someone who is desperate for people to like him.
And Boyle surely realises that, when the Greens are out of office, his followers will drift away. Hatoyama’s real failure here is the apparent inability to recognise that it isn’t the merit of his tweets that have attracted 674,557 followers, but rather the position he holds. Now that he’s a failed prime minister, what he has to say just isn’t as important or relevant anymore.
