WORLD BRIEFING / JAPAN
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Prime Minister Taro Aso and his Cabinet resigned to pave the way for parliament to elect Yukio Hatoyama as the country’s next leader.
The resignations were a formality so that parliament’s lower house, now controlled by Hatoyama’s party following a landslide election victory last month, can vote him in as prime minister. Hatoyama’s victory ends more than 50 years of nearly unbroken rule by Aso’s Liberal Democratic Party.
Hatoyama, head of the left-of-center Democratic Party of Japan, has promised to shake up Japan’s political system, cutting government waste, reinvigorating the world’s second-largest economy and focusing policies on consumers, not big business.
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