Japan’s vital lower house election examines scandal-hit LDP government

TOKYO (Kyodo) — Japan faces a key election in the 465-seat House of Representatives on Oct. 27, with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party struggling to retain power amid a deepening fund scandal high profile that has seriously eroded public confidence in politics. .

The next general election, the first in three years, will take place just a month after Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba won the LDP’s presidential race on Sept. 27, marking the fastest time for a new leader in postwar Japan’s history. pursuing a public mandate.

Ishiba dissolved the lower house on Wednesday, a year before his term ends in October 2025. Official campaigning for the election, in which voters will decide whether to allow the LDP to continue running the government, began on Tuesday.

Of the 26 lower house elections held since the current Constitution was promulgated in May 1947 after the Second World War, only one, in 1976, took place without the house being dissolved, as the four-year mandate of its members reached its full expiration naturally.

The lower house, which is more powerful than the House of Councillors, has generally been dissolved mid-term with the prime minister calling an election. On four occasions, the chamber faced dissolution after the approval of a motion of censure against the Council of Ministers.

The upcoming lower house elections will mark the sixth time they have been held in October, the highest number in a month. In Japan, elections to the upper house, in which half of the house’s six-year seats are contested, are usually held in the summer every three years.

(By Peter Masheter)

Kuniaki Nemoto, a professor of political science at Musashi University, said the prime minister could have tried to dissolve the lower house after the summer and before a regular parliamentary session convenes each January.

The ruling LDP coalition and its junior partner, the Komeito party, need a majority of 233 seats in the lower house to retain power. To achieve an “absolute majority” and control the 17 permanent committees of the chamber, they would need 261 seats.

In the previous lower house election on October 31, 2021, held just weeks after Fumio Kishida became prime minister, the LDP alone won 259 seats. This figure was down 17 from the 2017 election, but exceeded the absolute majority threshold of 261 seats with Komeito’s 32 seats.

Under Japan’s electoral law, 289 are elected from single-member districts and 176 through proportional representation in 11 regional blocs. Voters cast two ballots: one for a candidate in their constituency and one for a political party.

Candidates running in a single-member district can also be listed on their party’s list for proportional representation. If your party wins seats in the regional bloc, those seats are filled by the candidates in the order in which they appear on the list.

This means that even if these candidates lose their constituency by a single seat, they could still win a seat through the proportional representation vote if their party receives enough support. This is sometimes called a “consolation round,” a system that has drawn criticism from some voters.

More than 1,300 people are running in 2024, with 314 women running, the largest number in lower house elections under the current Constitution. The previous record was 229 in 2009, when the opposition camp ousted the ruling LDP.

In 2021, only 45 female candidates were elected to the lower house, representing 9.7 percent of the total seats. The election was the first since a law designed to promote gender equality in the political sphere was introduced in 2018.

This year’s lower house elections are also being held for the first time since the country’s biggest-ever change in the distribution and boundaries of single-seat districts to rectify a disparity in vote values ​​that it is considered to be in a “state of unconstitutionality”.

The revision includes adding 10 single-seat constituencies to five prefectures while reducing one from each of the 10 prefectures, aiming to reduce the vote disparity below the two-fold level between densely and sparsely populated districts.

In total, the changes would affect 140 single-member constituencies in 25 prefectures, with the capital Tokyo gaining five additional seats. The LDP, which has been in power for most of the period since 1955, is typically more popular in rural Japan.

The LDP “finds it very difficult to win seats in urban areas” as more people have moved to Tokyo over the past 20 to 30 years, Nemoto said, adding that the situation “could make it difficult” for the party government maintains its majority in the lower house.