Why has Japan’s longtime ruling party lost its majority? Tobias S. Harris on political scandals, economic struggles, and a deep loss of public confidence in the country’s institutions.
For only the third time in 55 years, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party failed to win a majority in the October 27 general elections. During the decades after World War II, the LDP led Japan through dramatic growth, as the country transformed from wartime devastation into the world’s second-largest economy by 1968—a status it kept until 2010.
But that was then. Japan’s economy has sputtered through years of stagnation, and in the past few, the country has experienced relatively high inflation for the first time in generations. And then—like the previous two times the LDP lost its governing majority—a corruption scandal tarred the party.
In the recent election, the LDP lost 68 of its 259 seats in Parliament. The party’s incumbent prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, was able to get a new cabinet approved by the legislature in mid-November—but now he and his coalition partner only have a minority in Parliament, creating new uncertainty about the party’s ability to govern. What happened?
Tobias S. Harris is the founder of the political-risk advisory firm Japan Foresight and the author of The Iconoclast: Shinzo Abe and the New Japan. Harris says the Japanese people have lost trust in the LDP—but not just the LDP; they’ve lost trust in the formerly cherished state bureaucracy along with it, and in public institutions generally. This growing pessimism is visible in public-opinion polls—and also in persistently low voter turnout over the past dozen years.
Still, Harris says, what’s happening here in Japan differs in one major way from what’s been happening in other advanced democracies facing similar problems since the Covid-19 pandemic: the absence of a populist political reaction. No party has tried to mobilize public anger with anti-elite, us against them rhetoric. The Democratic Party of Japan, which ruled from 2009 to 2012, did have some populist tendencies—but its failures in office were followed by a loss of faith in government so profound that now, there are few voters left who think even populists could fix things …
Oliver Mills: Why would you say are the main reasons why the Liberal Democratic Party lost so many voters in this recent election?
Katsuma Tanaka
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