Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) posted its lowest polling numbers since 2012 on Monday, a grim omen of the ruling party’s fortunes heading into this Sunday’s elections for the upper house of the National Diet, the Japanese parliament.
According to a survey from Japanese public broadcasting company NHK, the LDP lost 4.1 percent support in a single week, bringing its approval rating down to 24 percent. LDP Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru fared somewhat better, notching a 31 percent approval rating.
LDP’s hopes lie in the fact that no single opposition party drew as much support in the NHK survey. The main opposition party, the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDP), fared best with 7.8 percent, but its support slipped a bit over the past week as its voters defected to other, smaller parties like the populist-conservative Sanseito which had 5.9 percent support in NHK’s poll.
A whopping 33.7 percent of respondents said they did not support any party, creating a large pool of wild cards for the opposition to draw when the election is held next weekend.
The National Diet is divided into two houses. LDP lost control of the lower house, the House of Representatives, in October. It was the first time in 15 years that LDP and its coalition partner Komeito lost control of the House of Representatives, leading to calls for accountability and new leadership from party members. Some thought it would be best if Prime Minister Ishiba resigned, along with his leadership team.
LDP fared poorly in a low-turnout election due, in part, to a massive political fundraising scandal. About 70 percent of the voters in October said they were aware of the scandal, and it influenced their voting decisions. The lower-house defeat kneecapped the administration of Ishiba, who had only taken office a month earlier and wanted a public mandate for his reform proposals.
“I believe that, to put it plainly, the anger of the citizens has not been dispelled at all,” Ishiba said when the October results rolled in, adding that he thought some voters misunderstood the arcane details of the fundraising controversy.
LDP’s smaller partner, Komeito, actually picked up a few seats in October, suggesting that some LDP voters wanted to express their displeasure with the direction of the party, without completely bailing on the center-right coalition. Komeito is a socially conservative party with strong Buddhist leanings, with a small but influential base of elderly and middle-class voters.
Komeito’s partnership with LDP is interesting because Komeito actually tells most of its ideological supporters to vote LDP instead.
Komeito began as the political wing of a Buddhist sect called Soka Gakkai, a global revivalist movement that remains active to this day. Komeito has been rewarded for politely refusing to contest LDP seats by gaining outsized informal influence over certain areas of foreign policy. Komeito leaders are notably friendlier to China, more critical of defense spending, and more strongly opposed to nuclear power than the LDP.
NHK’s poll showed decent support for Komeito, on par with most of the opposition parties, but Komeito runs so few candidates that it might end up winning only a single seat in Tokyo this weekend.
Japan reserves some parliamentary seats for its curious “proportional representation” system in which voters choose a party rather than a candidate, and the party doles out the seats to its published list of preferred candidates. Polls show Komeito will probably end up with a total of ten seats, down from 14 going into the election.
Political analysts predicted in October that Ishiba would suffer another blow in July’s election for the upper house, the House of Councilors, and that prediction looks solid based on NHK’s polling data. The electoral map looks even worse than NHK’s opinion poll, with LDP leading in only nine of the 32 most hotly-contested single-seat elections. LDP-Komeito currently hold 140 seats in the upper house, and 125 are needed for a majority.
LDP took another hit on Monday with the resignation of Tsuruho Yosuke, a senior party lawmaker and head of the Budget Committee in the House of Councilors.
Tsuruho came under fire for saying, during a rally in his home prefecture of Wakayama last week, that the January 2024 earthquake in the central Noto Peninsula was a “fortunate” opportunity for the government to demonstrate the effectiveness of its bureaucratic reforms.
The Noto earthquake was the strongest to hit Ishikawa Prefecture in almost 150 years, and the strongest in mainland Japan since 2011. The quake and its aftermath killed at least 600 people.
“I lacked consideration for the victims, and my wording was inappropriate. I apologize and retract the remark,” Tsuruho said after the controversy erupted.
The veteran legislator found few supporters in LDP leadership, which saw its fortunes in the next election slipping even further, or the Ishiba administration, which has been touting the effectiveness of its disaster preparedness and response measures.
The opposition piled on Tsuruho, with CDP leader Noda Yoshihiko demanding his resignation from parliament. Municipal assemblies in the Noho Peninsula wrote a letter of protest, questioning the sincerity of Tsuruho’s apology.
The Noho letter asked LDP to take action against Tsuruho, and LDP Secretary-General Moriyama Hirohsi obliged with a stern public rebuke. On Monday, Tsuruho resigned as head of the House of Councilors Budget Committee, although he did not step down from his parliamentary seat as many of his critics had demanded.
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