Japan's high-stakes election
What I will be watching on Sunday
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Looking ahead to Sunday, I will be following returns on social media (Twitter; Bluesky) and, as I did during the LDP leadership election, I will also be sharing updates and taking questions in the Substack chat.
On 8 October, the day before Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru dissolved the House of Representatives, Ozawa Ichirō, the venerable political operator tasked by Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP) leader Noda Yoshihiko with forging electoral partnerships with other opposition parties, spoke pessimistically about the opposition’s chances in the general election.
The Japanese people are weak with this kind of thing. They vote based on human relationships, sentimental relationships. Therefore, the party that does its best to appeal to emotions is strongest in Japan.
The LDP has never lost an election because of scandal. No matter what the media writes, no matter who says what, they generally win during times of scandal because they work hard.
With the end of the campaign on Saturday, 26 October, we will soon find out if Ozawa was right – if the Japanese voters are too soft-hearted to abandon the LDP – or if in fact the dominant emotion of the Japanese general election is anger, anger at the LDP’s corrupt practices and backroom dealings to the point of wanting to punish the party even at the price of political stability. In the final days of the campaign, Ishiba has sought to defuse this anger with apologies for the party’s behavior and convince voters that what is at stake is something more fundamental, that only the LDP and Kōmeitō can be trusted to, as Ishiba said Saturday, “protect Japan’s independence.” But there is little sign that these appeals have resonated.
Opinion polls are pointing to what could be a historic blow to the ruling coalition, though they have suggested that the final results could range anywhere from a bare majority for the ruling coalition to what could effectively be a hung parliament, with the LDP and Kōmeitō with a plurality but no pathway to a working majority, forced to rely on external cooperation.
As election day dawns and we wait for the polls to close at 8pm JST, here is what I will be watching for as results come in.
Voter turnout
Turnout is obviously critical, but it is difficult to determine whether voters are prepared to turn out in greater numbers than in 2021. Will the opposition parties convince more independents to show up and vote against the LDP? Early voting, which closed Saturday, offers few hints. 16.43 million people voted early, 15.77% of all voters, a marginal decline from 2021 (0.01 percentage points as a percentage of all voters). However, the decline in early voting was particularly pronounced in Tokyo (8.1%) and Osaka (7.44%), outweighing the increases in thirty-one prefectures.
However, it is possible that the opposition could fare better even without higher turnout, if polling suggests that LDP supporters will vote against the party is correct.
The scandal-implicated candidates
Naturally, the races of greatest interest will be the forty-four constituencies featuring LDP members, including the ten who have been forced to run as independents, implicated in the kickback scandal. The Mainichi Shimbun estimated earlier this week that opposition candidates were leading in nearly half (twenty-one) of the forty-four, with another eight too close to call. These races – and how quickly they are called – will be a useful indicator of what kind of night the LDP will have.
The DPJ heartlands
The story of the decline in political competition – the emergence of the “one strong, many weak” political system of the Abe years – is the story of the Democratic Party of Japan and its successor parties losing ground in regions that had been critical to the DPJ’s rise, including Hokkaido, Tokyo and its neighbors, parts of Tohoku, and Nagoya and its hinterlands. Polling suggests that the CDP and to a lesser extent the Democratic Party for the People (DPFP), the two DPJ successor parties, are poised to make gains in these regions. In Aichi in particular, the CDP may reap the benefits of Noda’s decision to break with the Japanese Communist Party (JCP), electoral cooperation that cost the CDP support from organized labor. If the CDP picks up seats in these parts of the country, it could signal a more durable return to political competition between two major parties.
Ishin no Kai’s crisis
I wrote previously on Ishin no Kai’s existential crisis, and the electoral campaign has shown that the party’s crisis is far from resolved. The party’s plans to break out from its Kansai stronghold were largely abandoned; its efforts during the campaign were predominantly directed towards holding the Osaka single-member districts that its candidates flipped in 2021 (and gaining new ground in Osaka at Kōmeitō’s expense, as the truce between Ishin and Kōmeitō broke down). The party may well limit its losses, but the fact that the focus is on whether Ishin can limit the number of seats it loses rather than how big its gains will be suggests that there are still questions about the party’s future.
Electoral machines
While the ability of the LDP to mobilize its voters – and limit defections by LDP supporters to other parties – will be the critical question of the election, the general election will also be a test of two other electoral machines. Kōmeitō has seen its gross vote totals fall in recent elections as its base has aged and shrunk, and amidst debates within the lay Buddhist organization Sōka Gakkai over what role the organization should play in electoral politics. (See my discussion with Levi McLaughlin here.) If Kōmeitō’s vote continues to decline, it will have a material impact on the outcome – given the degree to which some LDP candidates depend on it to win their seats – but also could impact LDP perceptions of the party’s desirability as a partner.
Meanwhile, the JCP may be grappling with a demographic crisis of its own, as its own support base ages. If the CDP does well despite the JCP’s decision to field candidates against CDP candidates in 142 single-member districts, it could be an indicator that the party is in irreversible decline as a factor in the political system, particularly with the emergence of Reiwa Shinsengumi as a party with a virtually identical program but with greater ability to appeal to younger voters.
If the coalition falls short
The LDP’s history of electoral success means that there are not many precedents for what an LDP party leader and prime minister should do in the event of an electoral defeat. In 2009, Asō Tarō stayed on and managed the transition to the DPJ-led Hatoyama government on 16 September. In 1993, however, when the LDP lost a majority but remained the largest party, Prime Minister Miyazawa Kiichi stayed on as LDP leader for several weeks as the parties negotiated possible coalitions. But if the ruling coalition cannot in fact reach its 233-seat “victory line,” Ishiba may face unavoidable pressure to resign immediately to take responsibility for the defeat.
But if Ishiba steps down, one month to the day after his election as LDP leader, it would present several immediate problems. First, an LDP-centered coalition government would still be the most likely outcome after the election, meaning that someone would have to take responsibility for coalition negotiations, or at least negotiations to secure outside cooperation with the DPFP, Ishin, or some other actors. Second, it could set the stage for what could be an even-more bruising intra-party battle between reformists and conservatives to pick a new leader. Alternatively, it could result in the elevation of a compromise candidate like Finance Minister Katō Katsunobu, who may be acceptable to both camps but who has comparatively little public following and would do little to repair public trust following an electoral defeat. Third, it could mean that Japan is in the midst of another leadership transition just as the US holds its presidential election and faces a potentially turbulent post-election period and transition to a new administration.
To my mind, it therefore seems possible that Ishiba could linger on past the election in certain scenarios. Even his bested opponent Takaichi Sanae may prefer Ishiba to hang on as a caretaker, at least in the near term, than rush into another leadership election in which the party is determined to stabilize its situation rather than take its chances on a wild card like Takaichi. If Ishiba survives, he will be highly constrained, vulnerable to defections, and perhaps just biding time until he either resigns or is brought down by a no-confidence motion.
The reality is that if the ruling coalition falls short of 233 seats, it will simply be messy, with numerous possibilities considered by the key players. For example, in the Shūkan Fuji, journalist Hirai Fumio outlines a scheme whereby the LDP, in order to bring a DPFP that has heretofore said it would not join a coalition, into a coalition government, would offer the premiership to DPFP leader Tamaki Yūichirō, enabling the party to sideline Ishiba without needing to have another leadership campaign little more than a month after its last one ended. Some options seem more plausible than others – it seems highly unlikely that the LDP and CDP would forge a grand coalition, for example – but it may be difficult to rule out an Ishiba-led caretaker government, an orderly transition to a compromise candidate within the LDP, or third option like the aforementioned Tamaki government. The fact is that even if the ruling coalition manages to stay above 233 seats, Japan will still likely face greater instability and fluidity, since an Ishiba government with a slender majority could still be vulnerable to intra-party or intra-coalition pressure as well as pressure from the opposition.
As the above discussion suggests, the story of this general election may be simple, even if the outcome is not. After the kickback scandal emerged last December, I wrote, “The predictable stability that characterized Japanese politics since 2012 is in all likelihood over.”
This election – and the LDP election that preceded it – serves only to reinforce the feeling that the next decade of Japanese politics will look very different from the preceding decade. Weak, short-lived governments; ungainly coalitions; party splits and mergers; new political competition resulting in a change of ruling party. All of these outcomes are now conceivable, with the result being that policymaking could become more “immobile,” its international presence diminished after an era in which Japan exercised greater regional and global leadership than ever before.
What a extraordinary and major contribution to the study of elections in Japan. I have been witnessing Japanese electoral politics since the late 1950s. No one in English has ever prepared the foreign observer so well for election day. Thanks ever so much Tobias.
Michael Wade Donnelly
Toronto