Voters dealt Japan’s government a stinging blow in upper house elections yesterday, a reverse that could thwart its ambitions to curb the country’s massive public debt and threaten Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s job.
Exit polls showed Kan’s Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) was set to win just 47 seats and its tiny partner, the People’s New Party, none, losing their majority in parliament’s upper house.
That was fewer than the 50 seats projected for the main opposition Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and far short of Kan’s goal of winning 54.
The result leaves Kan vulnerable to a challenge from inside his own party, though he was quoted by broadcaster NHK as saying he planned to stay on. He is already the fifth prime minister that the world’s second-largest economy has had in three years.
The DPJ swept to power in a historic landslide just last year, ousting the long-dominant conservative Liberal Democrats with promises to cut waste and focus spending on consumers.
However, public backing nosedived because of indecisive leadership and mishandling of a feud over a US airbase.
Public support for the DPJ rebounded when Kan took over last month, but it tumbled almost as quickly after he floated a rise in the sales tax from 5 percent to help rein in debt.
“There will certainly be pressure for Kan to go, given that the only explanation for the DPJ’s loss is his mishandling of the advantage he acquired after he became PM,” said Koichi Nakano, a political science professor at Sophia University.
The Democrats will almost certainly keep running the government given their grip on parliament’s more powerful lower house, but they will need to seek new partners to control the upper chamber, which can block bills, as they struggle to engineer growth and rein in a public debt almost twice the size of its nearly US$5 trillion economy.
“Kan lost the election calling for a sales tax hike,” said Koichi Haji, chief economist at NLI Research Institute.
When markets open today, share prices could fall on concern about the policy gridlock ahead and Japanese government bond yields may rise on fears that fiscal reform will stall, but analysts said wild swings were unlikely given that a reverse for the DPJ had been widely expected.
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