News of Ozawa resignation having no visible impact on election: poll+

TOKYO, May 12 Kyodo -
Ichiro Ozawa's announcement that he will resign as leader of the main
opposition Democratic Party of Japan has so far had no visible impact with
regard to the upcoming general election, a Kyodo survey suggested Tuesday.

The telephone poll, conducted Monday and Tuesday, showed that 65.5% of the
1,024 respondents said Ozawa's resignation as DPJ chief following a political
funds scandal has come too late, with only 24.7 percent agreeing that Ozawa's
stated reason for stepping down -- enhancing party solidarity so as to win the
election and form a government -- was convincing.
Meanwhile, the approval rate for the Cabinet of Prime Minister Taro Aso stood
at 28.0%, down 1.6 points from the previous Kyodo poll in late April, but with
the disapproval rate falling 1.1 points to 55.1 percent.
The poll was conducted from Monday night in the wake of Ozawa's resignation
announcement, which had been expected prior to the election, which must be held
by the fall, as even some DPJ lawmakers have publicly called for his
resignation to take the blame for the scandal in which his close aide was
indicted.
The DPJ remained ahead of Aso's Liberal Democratic Party in the proportional
representation sector for the election for the House of the Representatives,
with 36.5 percent of respondents saying they will vote for the DPJ in that
category, against 26.7 percent who said they will vote for the LDP.
In the previous poll, the figures were 37.9 percent for the DPJ and 30.8
percent for the LDP.
The two parties were still neck-and-neck in terms of overall support rate as
the latest poll found the rate for the LDP at 26.6 percent, down from 29.4
percent, and that for the DPJ at 25.9 percent, down from 29.7 percent.
While the DPJ is set to select a successor to Ozawa on Saturday, the poll also
found that Katsuya Okada, the party's vice president, is the most popular
candidate among the respondents, followed by Secretary General Yukio Hatoyama.
==Kyodo