PLD: The governing coalition renews its absolute majority in the elections in Japan | International

The Liberal Democratic Party (PLD) of Japan has won, but not convinced, in the elections held this Sunday. The conservative formation of 64-year-old Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, together with his coalition partner Komeito, has achieved an absolute majority by winning more than 261 seats in the 465-seat lower house. It is a figure above the modest goal that had been set, to achieve at least the simple majority alone. But as the count progressed it became clear that it will fall below the 276 seats it had obtained five years ago, 305 if it joins the Buddhist Komeito.

With a two-thirds majority in the lower house of the Diet, the Japanese parliament, Kishida can consider constitutional reforms and takes office less than a month after coming to power. Kishida, invested on October 4 when he won the internal elections of his party after the resignation of his predecessor Yoshihide Suga to run, hoped that these elections would give him a clear popular mandate for the agenda he has promised, of economic stimuli to promote the post-pandemic recovery and measures to achieve a more equitable distribution of wealth in a prosperous but unequal society.

When the recount had not yet concluded, the prime minister assured in a press conference that voters have “given him the confidence” to continue governing, although he acknowledged that his party will see the comfortable majority it held in the Lower House cut back until now. The coordination of the opposition parties, which agreed to present a single candidate in various electoral districts “made the situation of the PLD candidates difficult in many districts,” Kishida was quoted as saying by Efe.

Now he faces, among his most immediate challenges, the fight against climate change – his speech at COP-26 in Glasgow comes just after the elections – to give new impetus to the third largest economy in the world after the covid pandemic, and to combine an excellent economic relationship with China, its main trading partner, with the caution that the rapid rise of its neighboring country awakens in Tokyo.

But Kishida has failed to woo the electorate in his four weeks at the helm of the government. He has been weighed down by the memory of managing the covid pandemic, in which the PLD government was slow to launch the vaccination campaign, cases skyrocketed in the months leading up to the Tokyo Olympics this summer – very unpopular among the Japanese population – and the result was a long state of health emergency, finally lifted last month.

In addition, the fatigue after ten years of the PLD’s mandate and Kishida’s own personality has weighed. The former Foreign Minister is a not very charismatic man, with little footprint among the public, among whom his popularity is barely 50%; In the internal elections of the PLD he prevailed thanks to the votes in favor of the barons of the party, who bet on continuity, despite the fact that ordinary militants and the younger generations preferred another candidate with a greater reputation as an iconoclast, Taro Kono, 58 years old and until October minister in charge of the vaccination campaign against the pandemic.

The turnout was slightly higher than that of the convocation four years ago: 55.79% of an electorate of 106 million people, while in 2017 53.7% had gone to the polls. 20% had cast their vote in advance in a system in which two-thirds of the seats are awarded to the candidate with the most votes in each electoral constituency, and the remaining third is allocated by proportional representation.

Training Secretary General Akira Amari is among those who have lost his seat. It is a setback of enormous symbolic importance for the PLD: it is extremely rare for such a high-ranking official, the party’s number two, to lose in his constituency. Amari, appointed to his current position by Kishida, has already announced that he will resign. In statements after the closure of the polling stations, Amari acknowledged that the party faces the loss of a “considerable” number of seats, something that he attributed to the “anxiety and dissatisfaction generated by the covid.”

On the other hand, the opposition, agglutinated from the left in a coalition around the main progressive party, the Democratic Constitutional (PDC) -heir of the Democratic Party that governed between 2009 and 2012-, and much better coordinated than in previous calls, collected the seats lost by the PLD. The great beneficiary of the electoral day was the Innovation Party, which went from its eleven previous deputies to achieve, according to projections, between 34 and 47.

A weaker majority than his predecessors, Suga and Shinzo Abe – Japan’s longest serving prime minister (2012-2020) since the end of World War II – could affect Kishida’s ability to develop. his programme. It also raises the specter that had dominated Japanese politics in the 1990s and early this century: a succession of prime ministers of little relevance and shorter duration, some lasting just two months.

Instead, Abe used his large parliamentary majority to impose legislation that made it easier for Japanese forces to play a greater role in conflicts in the region. He also promoted the ambitious free trade pact known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), between the two shores of the Pacific, and kept it alive despite the withdrawal of its main partner, the United States, after the arrival of Donald Trump to the White House. Abe also regained greater prominence for Tokyo on the international stage, where he strengthened ties with Washington during his eight years in office.

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