THE INGREDIENTS were all there for opposition parties to make sizeable gains in Japan’s general election on December 14th. The economy sank into recession in the third quarter, households are struggling to keep pace with higher inflation and the government of Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, was losing favour. Even the election itself was unpopular. But the biggest opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), missed its chance, adding only 11 seats to reach 73 in total, or 15% of the lower house of the Diet, well below the 100 or so it needed to have a hope of winning a majority at the next general election. Your Party, a once-promising group dedicated to reform, disbanded just before the poll. Another, the hard-right Party for Future Generations, lost all but two of its seats. Perhaps the most promising sign for the opposition was that the Japanese Communist Party more than doubled its seats, but those votes will be largely wasted, for the party has little chance of passing new laws. Why is the opposition so ineffective? Partly, it is because of flaws in the opposition parties themselves. After the DPJ’s catastrophic defeat at the hands of Mr Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in 2012, the party did little to reshape itself after bungling its three years in power. It hung onto its leader, Banri Kaieda, who shirked the task of imposing a single policy platform on the party. The DPJ’s degree of unpreparedness for Sunday’s election surprised even the LDP; in over 100 single member districts across the country, it failed to find candidates to run against the ruling party. Smaller parties, including Your Party, and Ishin no To, the Japan Innovation Party, have tended to revolve around outsized personalities, who often come unstuck (Your Party’s leader, Yoshimi Watanabe, was caught with an unrecorded loan).

Yet a more important factor may be that the role of opposition party is already taken by parts of the LDP itself, which is less a unified party than a grab-bag of competing factions. Mr Abe’s most able opponents can be found on the party’s liberal wing. Oddly enough, another group that calls itself the “opposition” to Mr Abe is Komeito, a Buddhist party which is the junior partner in his own ruling coalition.

And it is difficult to be the opposition party when the LDP bestrides both right and left. The party supports lifetime employment by companies, which are prevented from firing workers, and is now trying to bully firms into raising pay. It is not the DPJ that is urgently pressing the rights of women in the workplace, but Mr Abe and the LDP. On the right, the LDP’s desire to change Japan’s post-war pacifist constitution, which was written by America in 1946, is shared by many in the DPJ. Often, voters struggle to tell the difference between them. Eventually, the LDP may split asunder to form a true opposition. But don’t hold your breath.

Dig deeper:

Shinzo Abe wins again, but what will he do with his mandate? (Dec 2014)

An interview with Japan's prime minister (Dec 2014)

Japan still needs economic reform (Dec 2014)