JAPAN'S bower house of parliament was dissolved yesterday in preparation for elections on October 20th, the first since 1993 when the Liberal Democratic Party lost its majority after ruling for almost four decades.
"With the world changing so much, Japan is being asked to make big changes too," the Prime Minister, Mr Ryutaro Hashimoto, reportedly told a cabinet meeting before parliament convened at noon only to be dissolved a few minutes later. "The time has come to appeal for public approval of how we build Japan amid such changes," the prime minister said.
The three-party cabinet later approved October 20th as the election date. The campaign itself is not expected to get under way officially until October 8th.
The dissolution came more than two years after the coalition was formed by the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) the left-wing Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the centrist New Party Sakigake.
Widely seen as a marriage of convenience replacing an unwieldly coalition of seven parties which collapsed in mid-1994 with the defection of the SDP and Sakigake, it was initially headed by the SDP chairman, Mr Murayama. The socialist leader stepped down in January, handing the reins to Mr Hashimoto, the younger LDP chief.
"Some eight months have passed since I took office as prime minister," Mr Hashimoto reportedly told the cabinet yesterday morning. "We have made a breakthrough in the bad debt problems of housing-loan companies. We have also seriously tackled the Okinawa issue," he said referring to a recent agreement resolving opposition to US bases in southern island prefecture.
Mr Takeo Nishioka, secretary general of the opposition New Frontier Party, said the dissolution wad a "step to break the impasse in ruling party-policies and to evade questioning" in a scandal involving his LDP counterpart, Mr Koichi Kato.
Mr Kato is accused by the opposition of receiving questionable loans but denies the charges.
"This election is about administrative reform. But the LDP cannot push ahead with reform because of its cozy ties with the privileged," Mr Nishioka said.
The election will be the firsts held under a new voting formula which divides the lower house into 300 single-seat constituencies and 200 seats elected under proportional representation. The lower house currently has 511 members elected from multi-seat constituencies.
While the LDP is considered well prepared for the election, the SDP and Sakigake have been recently rocked by massive defections to a new Democratic Party, which is to be officially launched today.
The new party had overtaken the SDP as the third force in the outgoing parliament with 41 seats. The LDP has 206 seats while the New Frontier Party formed by the remnants of the previous coalition two years ago, holds 163.
The SDP, the country's main opposition party until the last election in 1993, now has only 35 seats and Sakigake has been reduced to 14 seats, making it even smaller than the Japan Communist Party with 15 seats.