(Update) Japan Diet Expected to Enact FY 2024 Budget Thurs.

   Tokyo, March 27 (Jiji Press)--The Diet, Japan's parliament, is expected to enact the government's fiscal 2024 budget Thursday, following an agreement Wednesday between senior ruling and opposition party officials.
   The agreement to put the draft budget to a vote at the Budget Committee of the House of Councillors, the upper chamber of the Diet, and the full Upper House on Thursday was struck between Junichi Ishii, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's Diet affairs leader in the chamber, and his counterpart from the main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, Yoshitaka Saito.
   The budget for the year from Monday is expected to be enacted with support from the ruling coalition, which holds a comfortable majority in the chamber.
   The House of Representatives, the lower chamber, passed the draft budget March 2. The budget would be enacted within fiscal 2023, which ends on Sunday, even without an Upper House vote, given the Lower House's superior position under the Constitution.
   Ishii and Saito also agreed that the results of additional questioning by Prime Minister and LDP President Fumio Kishida of four former senior members of the LDP faction once headed by the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe over a slush funds scandal at the ruling party will be reported Thursday morning, before the start of the day's Upper House Budget Committee meeting.

(2024/03/27-19:11)

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