Japan votes in closest election in years as LDP faces ‘major headwind’

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Japan began voting on Sunday in a snap general election that has left the ruling Liberal Democratic party braced for losses at the polls and given the opposition its biggest chance to reset the country’s political balance in more than a decade.

On the final day of campaigning Shigeru Ishiba, the LDP veteran elevated to prime minister just a few weeks ago, told a rally in northern Japan that electioneering was tight in many key districts and that his party — in government for most of the past 70 years — was facing its “first major headwind” since retaking power in 2012.

No polls suggest that the LDP will entirely lose power to the opposition, though some suggest it could lose its outright majority. This would usher in a new episode for Japanese politics and mark the decisive end of the era dominated by the late prime minister Shinzo Abe.

Ishiba’s unusually frank admission, said political analysts, highlights the risk that he took in dissolving parliament in early October and calling a general election just a few days after being sworn-in as prime minister. Ahead of the election, the LDP alone held 256 seats in the 465-seat lower house of the Japanese parliament. Ishiba’s target is for the LDP to retain over 233.

If the LDP loses more than about 25 seats and its parliamentary majority, Ishiba could be forced to resign to take responsibility for his miscalculation and thus become Japan’s shortest-serving leader of the modern era. Any loss of seats by the LDP will force it to depend more heavily on its coalition partner and impair Ishiba’s chances of pushing reform as decisively as his immediate predecessors. If the worst fears of the LDP are realised, then it might be forced to look for additional new partners in order to retain power.

That risk, according to opinion polls taken during the short two-week general election campaign, appears to have risen. What was intended as a move to catch the opposition parties off guard and secure a clear mandate from the public has instead given Japan’s electorate — disgusted with money scandals at the LDP and feeling the strain of rising living costs — a forum to vent their dissatisfaction. 

In his last day of campaigning, Yoshihiko Noda, a former prime minister and now head of the largest opposition party, doubled down on his campaign message: the Constitutional Democratic party of Japan does not expect to be voted in as the majority party, and is not presenting a radically different set of policies, but the election represents a chance to punish the LDP and dent its capacity to rule. 

The LDP, said Noda, shows “no sign of remorse” for the slush fund scandal that has dominated headlines for months and called on voters to end an era of politics in which “the general public are made to look like fools”.

In a small sample of voters leaving polling stations in three separate districts of Tokyo on Sunday morning, about a third told FT reporters that they had used the moment to shift their usual support for the LDP to other parties.