1993:

After an economic crash and multiple scandals, the LDP lost it’s first election. A centrist coalition, consisting of everyone but the communist party and LDP, took over power. For a whole year! This coalition pushed through election reform, to make sure the LDP would never be as dominant as it once was. Instead of a purely first past the post election system, now 300 seats would be elected via first past the post and another 200 via proportional representation. These seats would be allocated based on the percentage of the vote a party would get in one of a number of large regions of Japan. Anticlimatically, the coalition split, with the socialist party leaving, and the LDP joined the coalition.

JSP, which renamed itself to the Social Democratic Party, completely collapsed. Between the moderation, death of Japanese unions and participating in a centrist coalition which many saw as too right wing and incompetent, and the rise of the Japanese Communist Party, it had no constituencies left. In 1990, they won 136 seats. In 1996, this was down to 15. They decided to join the new LDP-led coalition party. By 2003 they had 5 seats. Today, they have 2 seats.

1996 would also foreshadow the future of Japanese elections. The LDP, despite winning only 35,8% of the vote, won 47,8% of the seats. They gained seats even though they lost votes compared to 1993. It won a majority of the first past the post seats, doing significantly worse in the proportional representation. It was the least representative election in Japanese history, up until that point, with the LDP winning 33% more seats than they would have under a fully proportional system. The new election system only seemed to help the Liberal Democrats.

What was the the opposition doing? Splitting, uniting, splitting again and founding new parties. The opposition was in complete chaos. But what grew out of this was the Democratic Party of Japan, a centre-right neoliberal party. Whatever was left of the left was split between the Social Democrats and the Communists. In 2000, the LDP again lost votes, and gained seats. However, the Democratic party of Japan, started to become a major party. 2003 would be a lot of the same. LDP biggest with the Democratic Party behind. In 2006, LDP regained the majority.