Japan’s governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) appears to have lost its majority in the lower house of parliament for the first time since 2009, reports from the country revealed on Monday.
If the most dire election forecasts prove true, the conservative LDP and its ruling coalition partner Komeito will come up short of the 233 seats needed to form a government.
Sunday’s election was ordered by incoming Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru, who took over from Kishida Fumio on October 1. Kishida announced he would step down in August instead of seeking re-election after three years of steadily declining poll numbers.
“We need to clearly show an LDP reborn. In order to show a changing LDP, the most obvious first step is for me to bow out. Once a new leader is decided, I hope to see everyone unite and form a dream team to achieve politics that can gain public understanding,” Kishida said in August.
Ishiba hoped a new election would help to give him a clean slate, but instead the surprisingly poor results may have crippled his party. One of the major reasons for Kishida’s collapsing support was a massive slush fund scandal that engulfed the LDP party. Exit polls showed voters were still furious about the scandal and were unwilling to give Ishiba the fresh start he wanted.
The slush fund scandal involved revenue from tickets to LDP fundraising parties getting kicked back to individual lawmakers as personal income, without being reported properly to the government.
A secondary scandal detonated when the public learned LDP officials funneled a hefty amount of the party’s campaign funding to politicians tainted by the scandal in a desperate last-ditch bid to help them keep their seats. Ishiba had attempted to regain some public trust by refusing to give official party endorsements to lawmakers caught up in the scandal. The public was not amused to discover the LDP was secretly feeding them campaign money.
According to the Japan Times, fully 60 percent of the candidates linked to the slush fund scandal lost their election bids on Sunday. A few other lingering LDP scandals and political headaches finished off other lawmakers.
“The results so far have been extremely severe, and we take them very seriously. I believe the voters are telling us to reflect more and become a party that lives up to their expectations,” Ishiba said on Sunday as the scale of the electoral bloodbath became clear.
LDP is still the largest party in Japan by far, having governed the country almost constantly since the end of World War II. Before Sundays’ vote, it held 247 of the 465 seats in the House of Representatives, the lower house of the National Diet, as the Japanese parliament is called. Votes were still being counted on Monday, but forecasters said LDP could fall to as low as 153 seats, with a best-case projection of 219.
LDP’s coalition partner Komeito, formally known as the New Komeito Party or NKP, fared much better. LDP has relied on Komeito to provide a few dozen extra seats to retain majority control for the past 20 years.
Komeito, which is affiliated with a Buddhist organization called Sokka Gakkai, not only votes with LDP, but provides election volunteers to assist LDP politicians. LDP returns the favor by reserving a cabinet post, the Minister of Land Transport and Infrastructure, for a Komeito member. The two parties do have some policy differences, particularly on defense, where Komeito resists LDP’s push to revise Japan’s pacifist post-war constitution.
Komeito appears to have picked up a few seats on Sunday, going from 32 to perhaps 35 lawmakers, as it was insulated from the scandals that brought LDP down. The problem facing Ishiba’s government is that LDP plus Komeito may no longer have the 233 seats needed to claim a majority and form a government. The worst-case scenario for LDP would be if its arch-rival, the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDPJ), could put together a larger coalition and replace Ishiba as prime minister.
CDPJ was able to do something similar in 2009, the last time LDP lost control of the government, but LDP turned the tables and returned to power in 2012, while CDPJ collapsed to a shadow of its peak strength.
It looks as if CDPJ doubled its strength to 98 seats on Sunday by campaigning heavily against the LDP slush fund scandal, but it would still have trouble getting to a 233-seat coalition.
The third-largest force in the lower house, the Japan Innovation Party (“Nippon Ishin” in Japanese), is aligned with LDP on national security policy and a few other issues, but it also wants a smaller, cleaner government, which would make partnering with LDP a bit awkward at the moment.
In fact, Nippon Ishin leader Baba Nobuyuki said on Monday his “primary goal” in the election was to “prevent the ruling coalition from retaining a majority.”
“If that is achieved, we can take pride in having played a part,” he said, shrugging off an otherwise disappointing performance at the polls.
Baba flatly ruled out joining a coalition with either LDP or CDPJ on Monday, although many observers expect Nippon Ishin to support LDP in the end, because its differences with CDPJ are more severe.
Some Nippon Ishin stalwarts were almost as unhappy as LDP voters on Monday, as they felt their leadership blew a golden opportunity to displace CDPJ and become the second most influential party in Japan.
