Japan goes early again

Back in August, when then Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida announced his resignation, I noted that his replacement would “presumably lead the party into the next election, due in the latter part of next year.” But in fact the election is to be held in just two and a half weeks, on 27 October.

There’s nothing unusual about an early Japanese election; only two parliaments this century have run for their full four years. But it’s usually for political reasons rather than parliamentary necessity, and this year’s poll is no exception. The new prime minister and Liberal Democratic Party leader, Shigeru Ishiba, decided that he wanted a mandate in his own right and, hoping to catch the opposition off guard, announced the election last week, formalised by the dissolution of parliament yesterday.

Ishiba won the LDP leadership election against eight other contenders, a record. In some ways he fits the usual mold of the party’s leaders: he has spent a long career in politics (he’s now 67) and has been a candidate for the leadership multiple times (although not on the previous occasion, when Kishida was elected in 2021). But he’s also seen as something of a liberal and even a maverick by LDP standards; he is apparently more popular with the membership at large than with his parliamentary colleagues.

The leadership election was a simple two-round affair, in which MPs’ votes were equally weighted with those of rank-and-file members. Shinjirō Koizumi, the son of a former prime minister, topped the poll among MPs but did poorly with the membership; instead they preferred hardline conservative Sanae Takaichi (making her second attempt at the job) and, just one vote behind, Ishiba.

He then prevailed in the runoff, 215 to 194, despite the fact that MPs’ votes are more heavily weighted at that stage; it looks as if the bulk of centrist opinion within the party rallied to him to stop Takaichi. (Official results are here, in Japanese; I used Google translate to interpret them.) Since then, however, he has shifted to the right to try to placate the party’s conservatives.

In contrast to the complex internal politics of the LDP, winning the election will probably be fairly straightforward. The LDP was badly tarnished by a series of scandals under Kishida’s leadership, but that has failed to translate into much of an improvement for the opposition. Opinion polls consistently show the LDP with something approaching half the vote, well up on its 2021 score of 34.7%, plus another few points for its coalition partner, Komeito.

The LDP has two other big advantages. Its opposition is divided, primarily between the centre-left Constitutional Democratic Party and the right-wing Japan Innovation Party, or Ishin; last time they won 96 and 41 seats respectively against the LDP’s 261. And secondly it is greatly benefited by the electoral system: the majority of seats come from single-member districts, which are malapportioned to favor rural areas. (My preview of the 2021 election explains more.)

But while an LDP majority is overwhelmingly likely, that doesn’t guarantee Ishiba a full term. Like his predecessors, his big priority will be to keep control of his own party.