Coalition building will aid LDP
In his initial post-election analysis our Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin suggests that claims of a great victory for Japan's Liberal Democratic Party, or for Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, are probably wrong and certainly premature.
HONG KONG (JP): In the immediate aftermath of the Japanese general election, the focus of Japanese politics has quickly returned to the "smoke-filled backrooms" in Tokyo's Nagatacho district where Japanese politicians spend most of their time, and feel most at home. This frame of mind will be particularly intense after what has been an uncomfortable trip to the hustings for most political parties.
The full details of Sunday's polling in Japan's general election continue to emerge but the general voting direction is already clear.
As predicted by The Jakarta Post, the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party has won a plurality of the 500 seats in the new House of Representatives.
The LDP, under Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, will now have to take the lead in a new round of coalition-building negotiations, for two basic reasons. Firstly, The LDP does not have a majority in the lower House of Representatives. Secondly, the LDP does not have a majority in the upper House of Councillors. Solving the problem in one House may not solve the problem in the other.
The next special session of the Diet, convened primarily to elect the next Prime Minister, has been set to start on Nov. 7. So Hashimoto will remain the caretaker Prime Minister for at least seventeen days. The fact that he has been given this amount of time to secure himself a working majority clearly signals a calculation that coalition-building will not be accomplished quickly.
In the House of Representatives, a working majority means the LDP needs around 270-275 MPs. A simple majority of 251 seats is not enough. For several reasons, it will be difficult for the LDP to secure these additional 41-46 seats and it may become a protracted task.
Also, as predicted, the Japanese Socialists have suffered a stunning defeat. The Japanese Communist Party (JCP) has overtaken the socialists as the main left-wing minority party.
However, few anticipated the most disturbing and potentially dangerous signal from the voters -- the fact that about 40 percent of voters stayed home.
In this vital sense, the 20th general election was a defeat for all democratic politicians, and the hope must be that they will have the courage and honesty to see it as such.
Voter turnouts in Japan have been declining for several years. The highest in recent years for a lower house election was 74.6 percent in 1980, although the turnout in 1990 was close, at 73.3 percent. The last election saw the participation rate drop to 67.3 percent, but yesterday revealed a huge decline to about 59 percent.
There are several reasons for declining voter interest. Lack of familiarity with the new voting system was one. The short 12- day election campaign was another. The government's failure to explain sufficiently the new voting system was another reason why the electorate was turned off.
Politicians are also likely to excuse themselves by claiming the end-of-season Japan Series baseball championship (equivalent to the so-called World series in the United States) diverted attention from the election -- though the start of the second game in the Series on Sunday was delayed until after polling ended.
Clearly, disenchantment with all politicians was almost certainly the main reason so many voters stayed home. After four prime ministers and five cabinets in the three years since the last election, apathy has taken deep root in the electorate.
The Socialists, in particular, paid heavily for their expedient maneuver of bringing down the reformist coalition which ruled in 1993-1994 and then joining a coalition with the LDP in mid-1994. This jettisoned many of the main principled stands they had taken in the previous 38 years.
The respected Speaker of the dissolved House of Representatives, Takako Doi, recalled to lead the Socialist party just before the election, almost certainly saved the Socialists from a worse drubbing. The party only managed to win four single- seat constituencies but garnered enough votes overall to win eleven seats thanks to the proportional representation (PR) voting system.
The JCP won only two constituency seats, but in the PR voting the communists, who are the one political party in Japan which can truthfully claim to have been politically consistent over several key issues, such as the consumption tax, overtook the Socialists for the first time, securing 24 PR seats.
The JCP and the LDP were the only two parties to make gains in this election. The fact they were the two main parties contesting with the same name as they used in 1993 -- whereas all the other parties, except Sakigake, were either new or using new labels -- may have had something to do with it.
While the LDP did well to partially recover from its 1993 loss of an overall majority for the first time in 38 years, numerous reports asserting there has been "a great LDP victory" or "a great LDP comeback" or " A Hashimoto Triumph" are all exaggerated.
Certainly Hashimoto made no great claims in the election's aftermath but correctly noted the electorate's faith in the LDP had not yet been restored. Hashimoto called the election partially in the hope of leading the party to a majority on its own, and in hope of ending the need for complex coalitions. The prime minister was obviously disappointed he had failed to achieve that goal.
Indicative of possible troubles to come, in the first 24 hours after the election, the Socialists, Sakigake, Minshuto, and, inevitably, the JCP all asserted they were not be willing to join an LDP coalition.
One complication is that while the Socialists are still in a position to help Hashimoto attain a majority in the upper house, their support in the House of Representatives would not be sufficient.
Moreover, Doi saved something from the Socialist wreck by asserting the party would return to its roots as an opposition party. The real size of the Socialist defeat is not that it more than halved its pre-election strength in the lower house (from 70 seats in 1993 to 15 seats now.
Doi believes the Socialist's residual strength in the House of Councillors will disappear at the next upper house election in 1998 if the party continues to make itself an appendage of the LDP.
Similarly, Shinto Sakigake won 13 seats in 1993 and now has only a miserable two seats. It offers Hashimoto very little and he offers Sakegake even less.
Seeing what happened in this election to those who joined the LDP out of expediency is hardly an incentive for others to do the same thing now.
The new Minshuto grouping, formed only on Sept. 30, has particular reason to be cautious about any Hashimoto overtures. Minshuto sustained its preelection strength of 52 seats, but most of those were won by those who defected from the Socialists or Sakigake in September.
Those defectors have been lucky to survive. They would be stretching their luck too far if they quickly returned to the LDP's embrace.
Given all the complexities, Hashimoto may well need nearly all of those 17 days in the smoke-filled backrooms before he can be sure of ceasing to be a caretaker.
Tabel:
Japanese Election Oct. 20, 1996
Results for the new House of Representatives ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Party Seats held at Candidates won in Total
dissolution Single Seat Proportional
Constituencies Representation ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Liberal Democratic 211 169 70 239 Party (LDP)
Shinshinto (New 160 96 60 156 Frontier Party)
Minshuto (Democratic 52 17 35 52 Party of Japan DPJ)
Social Democratic 30 4 11 14 Party of Japan (SDPJ)
Japan Communist 15 2 24 26 Party (JCP)
Sakigake (New 9 2 0 2 Pioneer Party)
Other parties 6 1 0 1
Independent 10 9 0 9 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Total 511** 300 200 500
** includes 18 seats vacant at the time of dissolution