JAPANESE VOTERS have ended over half a century of almost continuous rule by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), sweeping them from power in a stunning victory for the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ).
As of midnight, the DPJ had gained 286 of the 304 seats won by opposition parties in the 480-seat lower house, the more powerful of Japan’s parliament. The LDP managed to win just 96, and its coalition partner, New Komeito, 12.
Media projections had the DPJ winning as many as 320 seats and the LDP losing two-thirds of its representation – an unprecedented victory for the centre-left party led by Yukio Hatoyama, who is now certain to become Japan’s next prime minister.
No other party in Japanese political history has ever doubled its representation in the Diet. The DPJ has almost tripled the number of seats it held when prime minister Taro Aso dissolved the lower house on July 20th. Fittingly perhaps, the LDP’s historic defeat was accompanied by an approaching typhoon, which failed to deter voters – turnout was projected at around 70 per cent.
With his party’s defeat certain, Aso told reporters last night he would resign to take responsibility for the LDP drubbing, and schedule a party leadership vote.
On a blustery evening in the city of Yachiyo, a 40-minute train ride from Tokyo, 20-year-old Ami Nitano was voting for the first time. “Nothing will ever change under the LDP,” she said, explaining why she marked her ballot paper for the DPJ.
Nitano is a “freeter” – one of the 19 million-strong army of part-time workers who make up 35 per cent of Japan’s workforce, and who have been hardest hit by the global recession.
The economy was the central issue in Japan’s 45th lower house election. The government reported on Friday that unemployment had reached an all-time high of 5.7 per cent in July, and that deflation worsened in the same month, with consumer prices tumbling a record 2.2 per cent.
“The economy is a mess,” 61-year-old restaurant owner Hiroshi Iwaya said as he made his way to a polling station in Yachiyo.
A lifelong LDP voter, Iwaya said that this time he planned to cast his ballot for the DPJ candidate, Yu Kuroda. “Until now, the LDP has always been the party in power,” Kuroda told the Independent on the eve of the election. “The citizens are angry with the LDP. We’ll put the people in the driving seat, and we’ll build this country together.”
The DPJ promises to redirect about 10 per cent of the national budget – about $218 billion (€152 billion) toward building what it calls a social “safety net”, including more help for the old, the poor and the childless. It has also pledged to waive tuition fees for public high schools, and to help struggling farmers.
Although this programme has been described in some quarters as welfare-ism, it has a more prosaic aim, said Mr Hatoyama: boosting Japan’s famously pallid domestic demand.
Yesterday’s election marks the end of the post-war political dispensation in which the LDP dominated Japanese politics, and in which the defunct Japan Socialist Party, some of whose members now belong to the DPJ, played a token opposition role, according to Gerald Curtis of Columbia University, an expert in Japanese politics. “There aren’t many junctures in Japan’s post-war politics when you can say, ‘That was a day that history changed’,” Mr Curtis told the Independent. “That’s today.”
The DPJ’s triumph marks the end of “opposition for opposition’s sake”, Mr Curtis said, adding that given the extent of Japan’s problems, Mr Hatoyama, the prime minister-elect, will have to be “Obama-plus”. As for the future of the LDP, which he said was a “victim of its own success” in overseeing the creation of the world’s second-largest economy, but then running out of ideas, he predicted it would not split up “because there’s nowhere for them to go”. A two-party system will finally take root in Japan, Mr Curtis added.
Veteran Japan analyst Karel van Wolferen said the DPJ “must be given a chance to develop a working relationship with the bureaucrats, so there won’t be systematic efforts to undermine it”. The DPJ, Mr van Wolferen said, is “the first party that represents an urban electorate, a middle class that has been very dissatisfied in recent decades”.