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The 45th General Elections in Japan was a vote for change and saw the massive rout of entrenched ruling party Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) led by Taro Aso. The LDP, which ruled Japan for almost all of the past half-century paid for its failures in the economic front. The watershed election of August 30 lived up to its billing with the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) surging to power. The decisive verdict is seen by all as the final blow to the island nation’s postwar order, which had been unfolding since its economy started slipping from the early 1990s.
The DPJ, founded in 1996, scored a decisive victory in the fifth general election it has ever contested, seizing power with a rock-solid majority. Never before since the end of World War II has a Japanese party made the transition from opposition to ruling party single-handedly.
“This has been a revolutionary election,” Yukio Hatoyama, the DPJ leader who later took over as prime minister told the international media. “The people have shown the courage to take politics into their own hands”, he added.
Hatoyama’s party has vowed to move Japan away from a corporate-centered economic model to an agenda that focuses on helping the common man. He promised to cut government waste and kickstart the economy by putting a freeze on planned tax hikes, removing tolls on highways and focusing policies on consumers, not big business.
The conservative Liberal Democrats, who with their precursors have held or shared power for 62 of the past 63 years, led Japan from bombed-out rubble to economic miracle but kept it firmly in the US camp. Failing to reform itself to address the aspirations of the Japan’s traditionally apolitical electorate, it finally lost. In a rare display of popular democratic muscle, the electorate firmly punished that party for the decline of this former economic superpower and its cloudy future.
Relations with the US
The new Prime Minister Hatoyama, during the campaign, had spoken of the end of American-dominated globalization and the need to reorient Japan toward Asia. His party’s campaign manifesto had called for an “equal partnership” with the United States and a “reconsidering” of the 50,000-strong American military presence. The re-negotiation of a deal with Washington to relocate the United States Marine Corps’ Futenma airfield, on the island of Okinawa can be a fallout of the regime change.
The White House in its post poll statement said it was “confident that the strong U.S.-Japan alliance and the close partnership between our two countries will continue to flourish” under the new government. “President Obama looks forward to working closely with the new Japanese prime minister on a broad range of global, regional and bilateral issues,” the statement said. Political analysts expect Japan to remain a close American ally, but it may be more assertive and less willing to be a blind follower of the US.
Many observers in the West will like to draw a distinction between the election rhetoric of Mr. Hatoyama and a Prime Minister’s whose policies are to be pragmatic. Some recent interviews of Democratic leaders are indicators that no such large scale changes vis a vis the US, are in the offing.
By distancing from the US, the Democrats wanted to recast Japan’s relations with other Asian countries, including on the touchy issue of history. The party wants to reverse Japan’s growing isolation in the region under decades of right-wing Liberal Democratic rule.
Economic Issues
Though Japan officially rebounded from its recession in mid-August, Japanese households have not felt secure about a lasting economic recovery. Japan’s economy is in its worst slump since the World War II, unemployment is at a record high and wages are falling. The rapidly aging population also threatens to be a drag on public coffers as the number of tax-payers decreases and pension responsibilities swell.
In its election manifesto, the DPJ said it will pay about US$3,000 per child to each family every year in order to encourage women to have babies and reverse the country’s rapidly aging and shrinking population. It also promised to pay about US$1,000 a month, to each unemployed Japanese youth as he looks for a job.
Japan’s budget deficit is enormous and the national debt is almost twice its gross domestic product. But DPJ believes the money can be found for its promises by unearthing money locked in corruption.
Party Position
In the powerful lower house, the Democrats virtually swapped places with the outgoing Liberal Democratic Party, winning 308 of the 480 seats, a 175 percent increase that gave them control of the chamber. The incumbents took just 119 seats, about a third of their previous total. The remaining seats were won by smaller parties.
The LDP was ousted from the number one position in the lower house for the first time since the party’s formation in 1955, as its strength in that chamber dropped to an unheard-of level—104 seats fewer than its previous low, following the 1993 election.
The urban districts in particular witnessed a veritable windstorm. In the last general election, the DPJ had won only 1 and lost 24 of the single-seat constituencies in Metropolitan Tokyo; this time, it took 21 districts and lost only 4. In nearby Kanagawa Prefecture, where the DPJ had previously lost all 18 districts, it won 14 and lost only 4.
In the single-seat constituencies, the DPJ captured 33.47 million votes nationwide, or 47 percent of the total, while the LDP received 27.30 million, or 38 percent. These ratios are almost a mirror image of the 2005 election results, when the LDP won 47 percent of the vote and the DPJ 36 percent. The DPJ also neatly turned the tables in the number of seats picked up from local districts, jumping from 52 in the 2005 election to 221 this time around, while the LDP dropped from 219 to 64.
Women won 54 seats in the election, the largest number ever. Of those winners, 40 were DPJ candidates. Thus far, Japanese women have played a meagre role in national politics compared with their counterparts in most Western countries. It is yet another sign of change reflected in the electoral verdict.
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