Voters in Tokyo knocked Japan’s ruling party from its position as the largest group in the city assembly, results showed yesterday, a warning sign for Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s unpopular government before elections next month.
Japanese media said it was a record-low result in the key local ballot for the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has led the nation almost continuously since 1955.
Public support for Ishiba, who took office in October last year, has been at rock-bottom for months, partly because of high inflation, with rice prices doubling over the past year.
Photo: AFP
The LDP took 21 Tokyo assembly seats in Sunday’s vote, including three won by candidates previously affiliated with the party, but not officially endorsed following a political funding scandal.
That breaks the party’s previous record low of 23 seats from 2017, the Asahi Shimbun and other local media reported.
Ishiba described the results as a “very harsh judgement.”
“We will study what part of our campaign pledge failed to resonate with voters and ensure we learn from this,” Ishiba told reporters yesterday.
Tomin First no Kai, founded by Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike, increased its seats in the 127-member assembly to 31, becoming the largest party.
The funding scandal “may have affected” the result, Shinji Inoue, head of the LDP’s Tokyo chapter, said on Sunday as the exit polls were released.
Policies to address inflation “didn’t reach voters’ ears very well,” with opposition parties also pledging to tackle the issue, Inoue said.
Within weeks Ishiba will face elections for parliament’s upper house, with reports saying the national ballot could be held on July 20.
Voters angry with rising prices and political scandals deprived Ishiba’s LDP and its junior coalition partner of a majority in the powerful lower house in October last year, marking the party’s worst general election result in 15 years.
However, polls this month have showed a slight uptick in support, thanks in part to policies to tackle high rice prices.
Several factors lie behind shortages of rice at Japanese shops, including an intensely hot and dry summer two years ago that damaged harvests nationwide, and panic buying after a “mega-quake” warning last year.
Traders have been hoarding rice in a bid to boost their profits down the line, experts said.
Not including volatile fresh food, goods and energy in Japan were 3.7 percent higher last month than a year earlier.
To help households combat the cost of living, Ishiba has pledged cash handouts of ￥20,000 (US$136) for every citizen ahead of the upper house election.
Masahisa Endo, a politics professor at Waseda University, described the Tokyo assembly result as “severe” for the ruling party.
“Tokyo is not a stronghold for the LDP, but it’s possible that its support is weakening across the nation,” Endo said.
Even if Ishiba fails to win an upper-house majority, it is hard to see who would want to take his place, while Japan’s opposition parties are too divided to mount a credible challenge to the LDP’s power, he said.
The opposition Democratic Party For the People (DPP) won seats for the first time in the Tokyo assembly vote, securing nine.
The DPP’s campaign pledge for next month’s election includes sales tax cuts to boost household incomes.
Sunday’s voter turnout rate was 47.6 percent, compared with 42.4 percent four years ago, local media reported.
A record 295 candidates ran — the highest since 1997, including 99 female candidates, also a record high.
The number of female assembly members rose to 45 from 41, results showed.
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