Japanese voters are not used to tough elections.
But with national elections to be held on Sunday, the party that has ruled Japan for all but four years since 1955 faces the possibility of losing its majority in the lower house, the House of Representatives.
Barely a month after Shigeru Ishiba was named the new prime minister in a leadership vote by the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, the party is facing considerable pressure from citizens angry over a long-simmering political funding scandal, rising inflation and the burden of rising prices. He then went to the election. family.
That does not necessarily mean that Japanese voters are ready to hand over government to the divided and weakened opposition party that won the last general election 15 years ago. Analysts said the incumbent party was likely to win enough seats to retain power in parliament or be forced to field a new coalition partner to stay in power.
“The most interesting thing about this election is the uncertainty,” said Masaru Kono, a political scientist at Waseda University in Tokyo.
Unlike other countries, where voters are divided over ideology and vastly different policy platforms, Japanese voters find none of the options attractive and are frustrated by a sense of complacency from the ruling party.
On the eve of the election, Ishiba stopped by a rally for Liberal Democratic Party candidates near Tokyo Dome. He acknowledged the instability within the party and appealed to undecided voters in a crowd of about 500 gathered at the edge of the playground.
“Many people haven’t decided whether they’re going to vote until Election Day, and many people haven’t decided who they’re going to vote for until Election Day,” the prime minister said, standing atop a white voting booth. Election car in front of the local government tower. “Who will everyone vote for?”
In both cases in the past 70 years when the Liberal Democratic Party lost power, the outcome was widely predicted in advance. Since the party returned to power under Shinzo Abe in 2012, it has approached elections confident of victory. Currently, the party faces the possibility of losing its majority even if it cooperates with its traditional coalition partner, Komeito, the political arm of the Buddhist sect Soka Gakkai.
“I didn’t think the race would be this close,” said Masako Tanaka, 60, an office worker who stopped by a rally in Tokyo on Friday afternoon for Liberal Democratic Party members who are running a close race against the main opposition party’s candidate. , Constitutional Democratic Party. “As a citizen myself, I am even more excited than usual about elections,” she said.
Mr. Ishiba, 67, said at a campaign rally that he felt “the greatest sense of crisis.” According to a poll conducted by the Nihon Keizai Shimbun and TV Tokyo, his initial approval rating after taking office on October 1 was the lowest of any Japanese prime minister during the same period since 2002.
As the election begins, the Liberal Democratic Party continues to enjoy the highest level of support, with just over 31 percent of voters supporting the Liberal Democratic Party, according to a poll by public broadcaster NHK. The support rate for the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan was less than 10% of voters surveyed. The largest percentage of voters, 35 percent, said they had no particular support for any political party.
The situation the Liberal Democrats are facing, or perhaps creating, is reminiscent of the last two times they lost power. Voters expelled the party in 1993 following revelations of corruption and the sudden bursting of a real estate bubble that plunged the economy into recession. Seven different opposition parties came together to form a government, but it collapsed within just 11 months.
In 2009, Democrats won a landslide victory as voters sought to punish Liberal Democrats for their failure to revive a moribund economy. In both cases, the opposition parties did not offer a solid vision for change or give voters an opportunity to express their dissatisfaction with the long-standing ruling party.
In August, Fumio Kishida announced that he would resign as prime minister in order to reset the party’s reputation. Analysts said the party and Mr. Ishiba had missed that opportunity.
Jiro Yamaguchi, a political scientist at Hosei University in Tokyo, said, “I had hoped that Mr. Ishiba would implement some reforms to rid the Liberal Democratic Party of its corrupt image.” But Ishiba, previously seen as a politician unafraid to throw away party ties, has withdrawn some of his more prominent campaign promises. “He seemed co-opted by the old party system,” Yamaguchi said.
In a debate before the leadership election, he floated plans to push for higher interest rates, a capital gains tax, the creation of an Asian version of NATO and changes to the agreement governing U.S. forces in Japan. He suggested he might support changing the law to require married couples to use one surname. Regarding all these proposals, he has already retreated, clearly bowing to party orthodoxy.
Ishiba has also had a poor response to the issue that seems to bother voters the most: political funding scandals. The party has been unable to regain voters’ trust for more than a year after some Liberal Democratic Party members were accused of receiving kickbacks from ticket sales to political fundraising groups.
Despite more than 45 politicians being involved, the Prime Minister announced that the party would be withdrawing support from just 12 candidates. Nine of them are still running, and last week Japanese news media revealed that the Liberal Democratic Party had transferred 20 million yen (about $131,000) to local branches of candidates who had lost the party’s endorsement. .
Even though voters have plenty of other things to complain about, including rising food prices, pressing demographic pressures from a rapidly aging population, and rising tensions with North Korea and China, the opposition They see scandal as the most powerful rallying cry. The leaders of the Constitutional Democratic Party have not only emphasized differences in policy, but have also consistently talked about the LDP’s problems with “politics and money.”
This approach is likely to erode some support for the Liberal Democrats, but loyal voters, particularly in rural areas where communities rely on government benefits, are unlikely to be swayed by the scandal.
“I would be very surprised if the Liberal Democratic Party didn’t have regular victories in rural areas,” said Amy Catalinak, an associate professor of political science at New York University who studies Japan’s pork barrel politics.
Additionally, she said the opposition is highly fragmented, with at least 12 parties fielding candidates, which could prevent other parties from gaining an advantage. “The fact that there are so many opposition candidates is a hope for the Liberal Democratic Party,” she says.
Mr. Ishiba, who represents rural areas in Tottori Prefecture, focused on Japan’s remote and depopulated areas in his election speech, calling his efforts “Regional Revitalization 2.0.”
Megumi Naoi, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, said such measures would affect his most loyal base but could alienate urban voters. “The Liberal Democratic Party should pour money into cities and talk more about the difficulties of cities and voters raising children,” Naoi said.
If the Liberal Democratic Party fails to win a majority, it may be forced to invite other coalition partners to help form a government. Kono said such parties “have significant bargaining power” and can demand ministerial positions and the adoption of favorable policies.
The most important question after Sunday’s vote is whether Ishiba will survive as prime minister. Otherwise, Japan may return to the revolving door type of leadership that characterized Japanese politics in the past.
“We don’t want to cause trouble like this again,” said Tsuneo Watanabe, a senior researcher at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation in Tokyo. “However, the situation is likely to be heading for very difficult times.”
