In 2004, Ozawa was affected by a pension scandal. Although cleared of any legal wrongdoing, he stepped down from the DPJ leadership elections, in which he had been unopposed. This forced Katsuya Okada to assume leadership of the party. Okada resigned after his party suffered dramatic losses against the increasingly popular Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in the September 2005 general election, and his successor Seiji Maehara resigned in April 2006. Ozawa was elected president again on 7 April. "The Economist" called Ozawa an "increasingly ineffectual bully" in July 2007 and partially blamed him both for enervating reformists in his own party and for DPJ failure to profit from LDP predicaments.