Tasmania isn’t the only place coming to terms with minority government. Readers may remember last October’s Japanese election, which turned out to be one of the most interesting elections of the year. The long-dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lost its lower house majority, but prime minister Shigeru Ishiba remained in office with a minority government because the opposition was unable to agree on turfing him out.
The three main opposition parties – the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP), the Japan Innovation Party (Ishin) and the Democratic Party for the People (DPP) – won 214 seats between them, only one behind the combined total of the LDP (191) and its coalition partner Komeito (24). A raft of minor parties and independents, most of them less than friendly to the government, shared the remaining 36 seats.
The opposition failed to agree on an alternative government, so Ishiba has struggled on with occasional co-operation from Ishin or the DPP. One of his advantages, which would have been a deterrent to any CDP-led government, was that the LDP retained a big majority in the upper house (known as the House of Councillors), whose elections are held separately. At the previous one, in 2022, it had been boosted by the sympathy vote resulting from the assassination of former prime minister Shinzo Abe just before polling day.
So there was more than usual at stake in the following upper house election, held last Sunday. And it went badly for the government. The LDP dropped almost 13 points and lost 18 of the 63 seats it had up for election; Komeito lost another six. Even though only half the seats are elected at a time, that was still enough for them to lose their majority, now with a combined 122 seats out of 248.
But the main opposition party, the CDP, didn’t benefit; its vote was almost unchanged and it still holds only 38 seats. Ishin picked up just one seat to go to 19, and the DPP more than doubled its vote and added 13 seats, taking it to 22. Big gains also went to the far-right party Sanseito, which jumped to 12.5% of the vote and added 14 seats to the one it previously held. (Japanese-readers can find the official results here; I’m relying on Wikipedia‘s summary.)
Between them, the CDP, DPP and Ishin were once again just one seat short of the LDP plus Komeito combination, winning 46 seats against 47, although they led slightly in terms of votes (32.8% to 30.4%). With their poor 2022 performance still affecting their upper house numbers, that doesn’t do much to encourage them to sink their differences in a serious effort to displace the LDP.
For prime minister Ishiba, however, survival is not just a matter of warding off the opposition. The LDP is ruthless with its leaders (with Abe being the big exception), and poor performance in upper house elections has seen off prime ministers in the past. Indeed, it’s rather surprising that Ishiba has lasted for this long, although no doubt the chaotic state of the world over the last nine months has fed a desire for stability on the part of his colleagues.
But this is probably the end of the road for him. Before long, the LDP should be facing yet another leadership election, with the choice of whether to pick some new colorless functionary or to find a more charismatic alternative that might excite its discontented electorate.
The World is Not Enough 