Reiwa repeat
Japan’s ruling party wins another election
Kishida Fumio may now show what his “new model” of capitalism means
OBARA HIROYUKI, a 33-year-old office worker in Tokyo, considered voting for the first time this year. But he overslept on October 31st—election day—and had other plans in the afternoon. When it comes to politics, “nothing grabs my attention,” he says. “Nobody around me votes—at work, there’s a sense that you shouldn’t talk about politics.”
Mr Obara’s apathy reflects that of his compatriots. Turnout was just 56%, essentially unchanged from 54% in the last lower-house election in 2017. The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has run the country for all but a handful of years since its founding in 1955, is the beneficiary of voters’ indifference. Along with its coalition partner, Komeito, the LDP kept control of the country’s lower house despite posting its worst results since it briefly lost power in 2009: the party lost 19 seats, leaving it with just 257, according to state broadcaster NHK.
Nonetheless, the result is no stinging rebuke: it still won more than twice as many seats as the main opposition party, the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP), and held on to enough seats to maintain a single-handed simple majority in the chamber.
Frustration with the government’s handling of covid-19 fueled the losses. While Japan has seen relatively few deaths as a share of population and has reached relatively high rates of vaccination (after a slow start), voters have given the national government little credit. Party grandees hoped the ire would recede after Kishida Fumio replaced the unpopular Suga Yoshihide as party leader and prime minister in October. But Mr Kishida, a milquetoast figure, has not done much better at connecting with the public. He is “just a puppet” of senior party leaders, lamented Kamada Tsugihiko, an 83-year-old former LDP supporter who voted for a small populist party. Mr Kishida’s administration’s approval ratings have hovered between 45% and 60%, relatively low for a new prime minister. Several LDP heavyweights lost in single-member districts on Sunday, including Amari Akira, the party’s newly-appointed secretary general. (Mr Amari will remain in parliament in the bloc of seats apportioned through a party-list vote.)
Yet the news was even worse for Japan’s embattled opposition, which failed to make use of the political tailwinds. It could not motivate independent voters. And memories of its messy rule from 2009 to 2012 remain potent. Aizawa Yuki, a 31-year-old man who voted for the first time on Sunday in Tokyo’s Kichijoji district, reluctantly cast a ballot for the LDP. “I don’t necessarily support the LDP, but I couldn’t stand the opposition party when they were ruling,” especially when it came to the handling of foreign policy, he says. The biggest beneficiary of the LDP’s slide was instead the Japan Innovation Party, an Osaka-based right-leaning populist outfit, which more than tripled its seats, from 11 to 38. But it has limited appeal beyond its home region, and it is rare for regional parties to go national in Japan.
On the whole, voters opted for stability. The ruling coalition secured more than 261 of the lower house’s 465 seats, a threshold known as an “absolute stable majority”, which gives it control over parliamentary committees and the ability to move bills through the Diet. At the same time, the result hardly amounts to a mandate for Mr Kishida, who will still need to prove himself as prime minister.
His first order of business will be his debut on the world stage: he is expected to travel to the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow on Monday, November 1st. When he returns to Japan, he will have to get to work on a new budget and an economic stimulus package to help guide the country out of the pandemic. That will force him to begin fleshing out his economic policies, which have thus far consisted of lofty-sounding but fuzzy pledges to create a “new model of capitalism”. Voters will have another chance to render a more complete verdict on their new leader when upper house elections roll around next summer.