The political trust election
The political trust election
On the eve of what promises to be a strange election
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The general election campaign will start on Tuesday, 15 October, and it is already shaping up into a profoundly strange election.
Most notably, it could feature a significant increase in the number of candidates running. In the 2021 general election, there were a total of 1,051 candidates, split between 857 candidates for the 289 single-member districts and 194 in the eleven proportional representation blocs. By comparison, this year could feature at least 1,339 total candidates, 1,108 in the SMDs and 231 in the PR blocs. (We will know the final figures when the race begins on Tuesday.)
While the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP), and Kōmeitō are running roughly the same number of candidates as they did in 2024, virtually every other party is fielding more. The Japanese Communist Party (JCP), in reaction to Noda Yoshihiko’s pivot since his election as leader of the CDP, is planning to run at least 213 candidates, compared with 130 in 2021, a sign of the near-total breakdown in coordination between the CDP and the JCP. Ishin no Kai, having committed to supplanting the CDP as the leading opposition party, is running 164 candidates compared with ninety-six in 2021, which, with the party’s fading support and weakening position in Kansai, increasingly looks like a strategic miscalculation. The Democratic Party for the People (DPFP) ran twenty-seven candidates in 2021; it will run at least forty-two this year, all but one in SMDs. The Reiwa Shinsengumi ran twenty-one; it is running thirty-five. The right-wing populist Sanseitō, which emerged in the 2022 upper house elections, is contesting its first general election with ninety-four candidates, while novelist Hyakuta Naoki’s Conservative Party of Japan will run thirty candidates. It seems like the only party running fewer candidates in the party formerly known as the anti-NHK party.
The important point to note is that most of these candidates have virtually no chance of winning their constituencies. Instead, Japan’s mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) system – which mixes representatives elected via winner-take-all SMDs and representatives elected via PR – incentivizes even the smallest parties to contest single-member districts as a way to drive up their PR votes. The perverse result, however, is that it privileges the LDP and Kōmeitō, who have the most reliable organized votes and makes it more difficult for opposition candidates to consolidate the non-LDP votes in their constituencies. (I wonder whether it also fosters a certain disaffection with democracy, as parties come and go.) While Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru’s LDP appears to be wary heading into the campaign – the party has allowed only that its “victory line” is a simple majority for the ruling coalition, which, depending on how one calculates their pre-election seat total, would mean that the party could lose up to fifty-five seats and still declare victory – the sheer number of districts in which multiple non-LDP candidates will be competing with each other as well as the LDP suggests that the party will well exceed these modest expectations.
Of course, what will ultimately determine the course of the campaign is what the Japanese electorate makes of all this. Despite Ishiba’s efforts to make the general election about a policy mandate, this campaign will first and foremost be a referendum on the LDP and its scandals, including both the kickback scandal and lingering questions about the party’s ties with the former Unification Church. “If we do not regain trust in the Liberal Democratic Party, our party will not be able to wield power no matter how much harmony there is within the party,” Ishiba admitted in a party leaders’ debate on NHK’s Nichiyō Tōron.
But it is entirely unclear how the public’s frustrations with the LDP and the political system more broadly will translate at the ballot box. Ishiba’s compromise solution to the question of whether to run candidates implicated in the fundraising party kickback schemes – withholding the party’s nomination from twelve candidates, preventing thirty-seven others from running simultaneously as PR candidates – does not seem to have landed with voters, with a Kyodo poll finding that 71.6 percent think it is an insufficient policy. The same poll found that 65.2 percent of respondents will take the LDP’s fundraising scandal into consideration in their vote, compared with 32.2 percent who will not. However, the most notable finding in the Kyodo poll is that 33.2 percent of respondents are undecided about which party they will support in PR voting, while the LDP leads the CDP by a 26.4 percent to 12.4 percent margin. How many of the undecideds will be convinced to turn out at all? Will Ishiba be able to convince enough of them that he is sincerely committed to a new politics? Will Noda’s new CDP be able to convince more voters to turn out against the LDP – perhaps even some disaffected LDP voters – or will protest votes be diluted among the many opposition parties? Is there a scenario in which the LDP can limit its losses – and concentrate those losses in the parts of the party most hostile to Ishiba – so that the prime minister emerges stronger?
I have been considering these questions as I prepare a guide and forecast for the 2024 general election, similar to my 2021 guide. Posting has been light as I have been preparing my forecast, which will be available for all paying subscribers and will be available to others for a nominal fee. My goal is to complete the guide by 20 October, a week before the election. In the meantime, I will resume a more regular posting schedule with the start of the campaign on Tuesday. All of my posting on the 2024 election will be available here.