I T IS THE opposite of election fever. On July 21st Japan will go to the polls to vote for 124 of 245 seats in the upper house, where members sit for six years. Were it not for the posters, the odd noisy campaign van and occasional rallies outside train stations, few people would notice. The vote is not the main topic of conversation in the media nor in crowded cafés. Indeed, given the lack of interest, some analysts fret that turnout will dip below 50%.

There is little upheaval in Japan’s politics, but that does not make them healthy. Turnout has long been falling for all age groups (see chart)—and the decline may accelerate if the young remain disengaged as they age. The lowering of the voting age in 2016 from 20 to 18 seems to have made little difference. Faith in the system is faltering, too. In 2018 only 40% of Japanese said they were happy with their democracy, down by ten percentage points from a year earlier, according to the Pew Research Centre, an American think-tank.

The dearth of interest is not for lack of pressing issues. Three topics are dominating the election. The first is a planned hike in the consumption tax from 8% to 10%, which is intended to slow the growth of Japan’s monstrous public debt (currently around 250% of GDP ), but which many economists fear could cause the long-faltering economy to stumble yet again. The second is pensions. The government has tried to disown, play down and deny the recent finding of the Financial Services Agency, a regulator, that the average elderly couple will need to top up their public pension by an eye-watering 20m yen ($185,000) to maintain a reasonable standard of living. The third is a proposed amendment to the pacifist clause of the constitution to make it clear that the Self-Defence Forces, Japan’s army in all but name, is legal (the government has abandoned the idea of scrapping the clause altogether). The amendment is the first item in the manifesto of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party ( LDP ), but polls suggest a majority of voters oppose it. Nonetheless, the LDP is likely to win handsomely. It has ruled for all but a handful of the past 65 years. At the moment, says Aurelia George Mulgan of the University of New South Wales, there is only “a weak desire to throw the bastards out”. “It is practically a one-party state,” says Hajime Yoshikawa of the Social Democratic Party. A few, like Mieko Nakabayashi, a former MP with the Democratic Party of Japan ( DPJ ), blame voters for not giving opposition parties a chance despite supporting many of their policies. The DPJ ’s three-year stint in power from 2009 to 2012 was “not enough time to raise a baby”, she laments. The DPJ ’s chaotic tenure made voters wary of turning to the opposition—a reluctance reinforced by nettlesome foreign-policy problems that seem to demand experienced hands, such as North Korea’s nuclear programme, China’s military build-up and American protectionism. The law that restricts most forms of campaigning to between 12 and 17 days, depending on the election, makes it difficult for new parties and candidates to catch voters’ attention and convey a coherent message. “Most simply repeat their names over and over again in front of train stations or on their campaign cars, because that’s all they have time to do,” says Kenneth Mori McElwain of the University of Tokyo. Even if the opposition were to get into power again, the bureaucracy, which has close ties to the LDP after all these years, would work against it, as it did to the DPJ .

The LDP ’s long dominance has also kept politics a pursuit for old men. This is the first parliamentary poll since the Diet approved a resolution urging all parties to try to field more female candidates: 28% of the 370 people contesting seats on July 21st are women, a record. But only 15% of the LDP ’s candidates are female. Many LDP MP s, including Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, inherited their seats from their fathers.

A recent poll of candidates revealed that the LDP ’s have less socially liberal views than those of other parties. “It is to do with the gate-keepers, the party elite, who have very old ideas of what leadership looks like and entails,” says Linda Hasunuma of the University of Bridgeport in America. There are hardly any openly gay politicians, for instance. Mari Murakami, a 29-year-old lesbian, says she feels “marginalised” when she votes, because the leading parties are against same-sex marriage.

The long tenure of Mr Abe has made things worse. He faces little opposition from within his own party because of his successive electoral victories and because of a weakening of the factions that once jostled for power within the LDP . He has concentrated authority in the Kantei, the prime minister’s office. A recent editorial in the Asahi Shimbun, a left-leaning newspaper, lamented that “the relationship between the administrative and legislative branches of the government has lost the healthy tension vital for a sound democracy… this has led to endemic arrogance and lax discipline within the administration.”

Ministers drag their feet about providing information to the public and debating policy. The budget committees of both houses have not held a single meeting since the Diet passed the budget in April. The government refuses to provide clear and detailed explanations of scandals such as the one concerning Moritomo Gakuen, a private school that has ties to Mr Abe and was able to buy public land on the cheap.

The Constitutional Democratic Party, the largest opposition grouping, is campaigning in part on reviving Japan’s democracy. Asahi reckons that the upper house elections “will be an opportunity for Japanese voters to make choices that help restore health to this nation’s democracy”. They seem unlikely to seize it. There is a chance that voters might deprive the ruling coalition of its current super-majority of seats, Ms Mulgan says, which would impede its plan to amend the constitution. But polls suggest even that may not happen, leaving the government strong and public enthusiasm for politics weak. ■