What now?
This is the question on everyone’s lips here in Tokyo after a dramatic general election which looks to have inflicted a potentially grievous wound on Japan’s eternal party of government. The Liberal Democratic Party (known as Jiminto) led by the barely broken-in new Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba lost its overall majority, even if its partners, the Buddhism-associated Komeito, are factored into the equation.
The result was a mess
In one of the worse nights in its history, the LDP, who have held power for 65 out of the last 69 years, lost 68 seats. They remain the largest party overall but will now have to scramble to put together a multi-party coalition, an arrangement likely so flimsy it might as well be made of rice paper. Ishiba will be lucky to survive, potentially putting him in competition with Liz Truss in the Brevity of Tenure league.
To be fair, the (at time of writing) Prime Minister is the victim of circumstances mostly not of his making. On top of a spluttering economy, the Japanese have become sick of the LDP and their serial scandals, the most recent being the news that multiple lawmakers had misused campaign funds. This came hard on the heels of revelations of the party’s links to the deeply dodgy Unification Church and the long-running and never-fully-resolved Cherry Blossom party affair (misuse of funds again). The party seemed suffused with corruption, much of it petty, but cumulatively leading to widespread voter antipathy.
Ishiba posed as the man to clean out the Augean stables, but he made an error in the run up to the election when it was revealed that a group of supposedly blacklisted lawmakers standing as independents (who had been involved in the slush fund scandal) had received the same party funding as the fully endorsed candidates. Ishiba had said the expelled would not be welcomed back into the fold if they won, but that statement looked extremely dubious when the financial data was released.
The ostensible winners on the night were the CDJ (Christian Democratic Party) led by former PM (with a now defunct party) Yoshihiko Noda. They have increased their seats by 50 per cent and now have 148. Noda seems to see his party supplanting the LDP in the future and he appeared to make great strides towards that goal last night. The excitable and irrepressible Noda, a former gas meter reader not from a traditional political family, talks a lot about change and especially political reform.
All that sounds rather thrilling, but the truth is more prosaic. The CDJ don’t have many original detailed policy ideas of their own and seem simply to exist to criticise the LDP and everything it does. There is some utility in that, but it can hardly serve as a blueprint for a revised governance of Japan. As for the portly Noda, who bears a certain resemblance to the late Alex Salmond, he only lasted a year as PM and was most notable for aligning his then party with the policies of the LDP. He was called the ‘best PM the LDP never had’.
The other sour note from the election is the dismal turnout, 53 per cent. It marks one of the lowest figures in Japanese history, and though it has yet to broken down demographically, it seems likely that the young once again found they had better things to do. Heading to the polls is now akin to playing shogi, going to watch rakugo or listening to enka – in other words, it’s something that only very old people do. This was brought home to me powerfully when I was preparing to start a high-level class of Japanese teens and news of Shinzo Abe’s assassination broke. I broke the news to my students and they barely looked up from their iPhones.
It is unlikely that yesterday’s result will lead to an upsurge in youthful interest in politics. Whatever ad hoc interim assortment of parties is stitched together to form a government will struggle to govern with confidence or even coherence. The alternative, probably short-term, possibility of no coalition but an issue-by-issue negotiation, will be complex and fraught with difficulties. It’s unlikely to be compelling.
Of those who are still engaged, many here are delighted that the arrogant and scandal-ridden LDP have taken a beating. But, in reality, the result was a mess and Japan is in danger of losing one of its most powerful assets: its reputation for stability. The leaders may have changed regularly but the policies barely twitched, and at least foreign powers knew what to expect.
It feels a little as if the Japanese, like the British perhaps, just got rid of or almost got rid of something they were very dissatisfied with, without a clear understanding of what they would get in its place.