Japan kicks off campaigning for Oct 27 polls as LDP coalition battles to retain majority

TOKYO – Will Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its coalition partner Komeito manage to hold on to their majority in the Lower House?

That looks to be the biggest question as official campaigning kicked off on Oct 15 for a

snap election

on Oct 27, a year ahead of the expiry of lawmaker terms. At stake are 465 seats in the powerful Lower Chamber of Japan’s bicameral Diet, as its Parliament is known.

Several pollsters have forecast a hung Parliament, which would be a stunning repudiation of

Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s one-month-old government

, formed on Oct 1 after he beat out eight other candidates in a bruising LDP leadership race that exposed ideological chasms in the party.

Mr Ishiba, 67, is now seeking a public mandate, but he has acknowledged that the contest will be an “extremely tough” one. He has set a goal for the LDP-Komeito bloc to win a simple majority of 233 seats – down from the 279 that the two parties held in the now-dissolved chamber – after a damaging slush fund scandal.

Following in the footsteps of his predecessors, Mr Ishiba flagged off his campaign in Fukushima on Oct 15 – a sign of how important the region’s recovery is for Japan after the devastating 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster.

Lawmakers implicated in the slush fund scandal were found to have wilfully kept money off the books, and the controversy has stoked distrust among a public that is reeling from the rising cost of living, and many remain dissatisfied with the LDP’s handling of the affair.

“The LDP is heading into this election with deep remorse (over our improprieties). This will be an election to revive Japan – I will create a new Japan,” Mr Ishiba said.

But the Prime Minister faces a

stern challenge in winning over a public

that is already lukewarm towards his fledgling administration.

A survey by Kyodo News taken on Oct 12 to 13 showed a 42 per cent approval rate for Mr Ishiba’s government, down from the 50.7 per cent that was recorded right around his Oct 1 swearing-in.

Public broadcaster NHK, in its first opinion poll on the Ishiba administration taken from Oct 12 to 14, showed support at 44 per cent.

Veteran political watcher Tadaoki Nogami predicted on Oct 15 that the LDP-Komeito bloc might win only 226 seats – just shy of the majority, while citing an LDP source as saying the party’s worst-case forecasts indicated the risk that it may lose more than 120 seats.

The LDP had won a comfortable majority on its own in the past four Lower House elections, since 2012. In the recently dissolved chamber, the LDP had 247 seats, while Komeito held another 32 seats.

The LDP is fielding 342 candidates in the Oct 27 polls, where a record 1,344 contenders are in the fray as a result of a disjointed opposition that has been unable to see eye to eye on backing unity candidates.

Among them is the LDP’s youngest-ever candidate Koki Ozora, a 25-year-old media personality and founder of a non-profit organisation, who is vying for an opposition-held ward in Tokyo.

Mr Ozora, who grew up in a single-parent family and has admitted to feeling isolated from society, has worked with the party on its committee to tackle loneliness and reclusion issues.

His non-profit organisation, Your Place, offers support to people of all ages who have nobody to turn to for help with their troubles, which could be as varied as social reclusion, bullying in school, child abuse, domestic violence or suicidal thoughts. It has received more than one million consultations to date.

Another young candidate is Mr Kansei Mori, 27, an IT start-up founder in Kyoto who aspires to “realise clean politics that is rooted in the lives of people, not politics that is far removed from people’s lives”.

Fielding young candidates appears to be part of Mr Ishiba’s attempt to project the image of a more relatable LDP that has its feet firmly on the ground, rather than relying on politicians with vested interests governing from their ivory towers.

The Premier has also yanked party endorsements from 12 lawmakers who were deemed the most culpable in the slush fund scandal, including former trade minister Yasutoshi Nishimura and former education minister Koichi Hagiuda, who are vying to keep their seats as independents.

Another 34 parliamentarians who have some culpability in the slush fund scandal retained the party’s support, but are being kept off proportional representation lists that are seen as a “backdoor” route into Parliament if they fail to win in the first-past-the-post system.

Each voter casts two ballots in the election – one to choose a candidate in their single-seat district and another to select a party for their proportional representation block.

A poor showing might be in the offing for Mr Ishiba, given his

precarious standing within the LDP

, though a strong win would give him the political capital he needs to stabilise his leadership.

A failure to win a majority would, from the outset, complicate his efforts to pass Bills in the Diet and force him to work with other smaller opposition parties. It would also hinder the LDP’s push to revise the Constitution for the first time since its enactment in 1947.

Meanwhile, former prime minister Yoshihiko Noda, 67, who now leads the main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDP), kicked off his campaigning in Hachioji in suburban Tokyo on Oct 15, a seat held by Mr Hagiuda which would ordinarily have been a stronghold for the LDP.

“A change of government is the greatest political reform,” he said, criticising Mr Ishiba for back-pedalling on many pledges, including a promise not to call a snap election, as well as his ideas on the economy, energy and defence policy.

“Let’s break away from the LDP and its politics of backroom deals,” Mr Noda said, likening the slush funding scandal to “tax evasion”.

But the CDP’s predecessor, the defunct Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), also squandered public trust in an ill-fated three-year reign from 2009 to 2012, in which it had to contend with a recession and then the 2011 disaster. The CDP held 98 seats in the dissolved chamber.

The pro-government Yomiuri newspaper said in an Oct 15 editorial that the policy pledges of both the LDP and opposition “do not convey an urgent sense that Japan is at a crossroads”, criticising the parties for merely listing themes and ideas that have already been discussed ad nauseam.

Sophia University political scientist Koichi Nakano told The Straits Times that voter turnout could be very low, given that “it could be an election with no particular salient issue, with neither leader being particularly inspiring”.