Opinion

Japan’s reliable, stable democracy has been shaken by snap election gamble

Worldview: Dissatisfaction with democracy and a return to recession has left Japan’s mighty Liberal Democratic Party floundering

Japan's prime minister Shigeru Ishiba reacting as results in the country's general election are released and the ruling party fell short of a majority for the first time since 2009. Photograph: Str/Jiji Press/AFP via Getty Images
Japan's prime minister Shigeru Ishiba reacting as results in the country's general election are released and the ruling party fell short of a majority for the first time since 2009. Photograph: Str/Jiji Press/AFP via Getty Images
Patrick Smyth's picture
Patrick Smyth
Sat Nov 02 2024 - 06:00

Prime minister Shigeru Ishiba is clearly not a student of form. Had he but looked to the UK or France, or indeed Portugal, in this international year of elections he might have had second thoughts about the snap election he called last month, and which has spectacularly scuppered both him and Japan’s mighty Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

Like Ishiba, Rishi Sunak and Emmanuel Macron in their vanity both trusted in their clearly flawed political instincts and decided, against all the polling evidence, that the time was right to surprise their respective governing parties and disgruntled electorates by springing snap elections. All got bloody noses from voters for their troubles. In Portugal earlier in the summer a similar snap election also bounced the country’s long-serving socialist government out of power.

This week the LDP, which has governed Japan almost continuously since the party’si founding in 1955, suffered the same fate at the hands of voters whose loyalty was no longer to be taken for granted. Ishiba was in office barely a month when he called the surprise short-campaign election three days into his tenure – notionally to strengthen his new mandate and, he believed, to catch the opposition off guard.

The ominous contraindications were there not only in the unpopularity of the LDP but in the manifest decline in popular trust in, and alienation from, both politics and politicians. Japan’s reliable, stable democracy is crumbling, it appears. Research by the Pew polling organisation finds that two-thirds of Japanese adults express dissatisfaction with the way democracy is working in their country, up from just under half in 2017.

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Japan is now also among the OECD countries with the lowest voter turnout, a trend that is most notable in the young. More than 40 per cent of the electorate is aged 60 or over, but while turnout among over-60s averages at 64 per cent it is about 47 per cent for everyone younger. For the past three elections among those in their 20s it has never risen above 37 per cent.

While the LDP remains the largest party, even in combination with its junior coalition partner, the Buddhist Komeito party, the two ended 18 seats short of the 233-seat threshold needed to control parliament. Voters had been particularly angered by the number of the party’s self-enriching MPs implicated in a series of party funding scandals, and revelations of links between other MPs and the cultish Unification Church or “Moonies”. Echoes of Partygate and the British Tories.

Although the LDP withdrew its endorsement of 12 MPs in a bid to put the fundraising scandal behind it many voters were not convinced. Inflation and the economy’s return to recession also played an important part. Ishiba was elected leader last month on his fifth attempt, having campaigned as a new broom with calls for the reform of his party, the establishment of an “Asian Nato” and the repopulation of rural Japan. He came quickly adrift, unable – not least because of the short campaign – to convince voters that the party was changing.

The opposition, led by the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP), has the opportunity over the next 30 days to cobble together an alternative government. It will not be easy. A minority government led by Ishiba, who says he is determined to stay on, will also find marshalling support from minor parties on a vote-by-vote basis difficult.

The eclipse of the LDP is a landmark moment not just for Japanese politics but in the democratic world. Japan is unique among highly developed democracies for having had only one governing party for most of the last seven decades. But that politically conservative stability, and now its fracturing, has become a political deadweight at a time when Japan faces huge challenges.

Each challenge has massive fiscal implications that require strong political leadership. On the one hand the question is how to reinject growth into the sluggish economy to pay for the spiralling social welfare and the health costs of its rapidly ageing population. And on the other it is how to adjust to new regional strategic realities: the threat posed by China projecting military power around the contested Senkaku Islands, over Taiwan and in the South China Sea; nuclear-armed North Korea; and, post-Ukraine, a muscle-flexing Russia.

For the majority of its political leadership, and increasingly the public, that means going beyond constitutional pacifism and a purely defensive security policy to embrace in practice the country’s new (since 2023) military doctrine. Not unlike Ireland’s recent defence review, this involves a hugely costly transformation of its defence forces. Ishiba’s folly of a snap election must put both of those projects in doubt, and will raise uncertainties in the minds of regional and global allies about the country’s ability to act decisively on the world stage.