Parliamentary elections Sunday

FE Team | Published: July 07, 2022 23:55:04

PM Fumio Kishida delivers a speech during a campaign for the upcoming general election in Tokyo on Wednesday — AFP

TOKYO, July 07 (AP): Ahead of Sunday's parliamentary elections, nearly a dozen opposition parties are trying to topple the Liberal Democratic Party, which has ruled, almost without interruption, since the end of World War II.
These include a party whose sole platform is a call to boycott public broadcaster NHK, and a party whose trademark is burdock roots and says the vegetable can beat bad guys.
Oh, yeah: There's also the fractured, bickering main opposition party, which has failed for years to put up a viable candidate for prime minister.
These parties, though wildly different in their policies, share a common trait: They have little chance of upsetting the behemoth LDP, especially as Prime Minister Fumio Kishida maintains stable support ratings and carefully avoids divisive issues ahead of the vote.
The dominance of the LDP is taken for granted here, and Japanese opposition parties, experts say, are more concerned about survival than finding a mutual platform that could viably challenge the LDP. Voters, meanwhile, seem to prefer the stability of the LDP.
"Opposition parties are hopeless now," says Masato Kamikubo, a policy science professor at Ritsumeikan University.
A big LDP victory on Sunday, when 545 candidates from 15 parties compete for 124 seats, or half of the 248-seat upper house, means Kishida could rule without interruption until a scheduled election in 2025. Sunday's votes will not affect the seats for party leaders who mostly belong to the more powerful lower house of Japan's two-chamber parliament.
Kishida has said winning a combined 70 seats between his LDP and its Buddhist-backed junior coalition partner would be a victory. Recent media polls predict an even stronger result.
That would allow him to work on long-term policy goals, such as national security, his signature but still vague "new capitalism" economic policy, and his party's long-cherished goal to amend the U.S.-drafted postwar pacifist Constitution. The LDP sees the war in Ukraine and people's worry about regional security as rare incentives to push for the charter change.
The current main opposition party - the Constitutional Democrats - rose from the remnants of one that broke up after its 2009-2012 rule ended in disappointment; its former members are still struggling to regain voter support.
"The situation surrounding the opposition parties is extremely severe," said Ryosuke Nishida, a Tokyo Institute of Technology professor of sociology and public policy. "We can easily assume that many voters, especially the younger generations, have trouble imagining anyone else but the LDP leading a functional administration."