Author: Editors, East Asia Forum

On 10 July Japan goes to the polls with half the seats of its upper house up for grabs. Coming off the back of three straight electoral victories since Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took back the party’s leadership in September 2012, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is expected to cruise to an easy victory. Abe appears set to retain the prime ministership through until the end of his term as LDP President in September 2018, or beyond if the party agrees to change its internal rules on consecutive terms.

The LDP has set itself a target of at least 61 out of the 121 seats being contested to declare victory. But given its previous strong showing, 56 seats would be sufficient for it to control a simple majority in both houses and form government without a coalition partner for the first time since 1989. Less likely, but more ambitiously, a victory of 85 seats or more for the LDP combined with its junior coalition partner, Komeito, would give the ruling parties a two-thirds supermajority in both houses, and the ability to take constitutional amendments to a national referendum.

The LDP’s apparent strength is premised more on lack of trust in the main opposition Democratic Party and a dearth of credible alternative policy visions than any deep faith in the Abe government.

The key issue for most voters is the economy. Abenomics, the government’s signature economic program, raised public expectations for a revitalization of the country’s economy after two lost decades of stagnant growth. As Shiro Armstrong points out, the three arrows of Abenomics — fiscal stimulus, monetary easing and structural reform — ‘were designed to be fired together’ so the first two could ‘boost aggregate demand while the reforms that bring immediate pain for longer term gain are implemented’. So far the difficult third arrow ‘reforms that take on vested interests are still to be tackled’.

Papering over inadequacies in implementing Abenomics first time round, Abe launched a second round of arrows in September 2015 pledging to increase nominal GDP to 600 trillion yen (US$4.9 trillion), an increase of 20 per cent. Abe also promised to provide better childcare support and reduce ‘the half a million elderly on waiting lists for nursing homes’. But given Japan’s shrinking and ageing population and declining workforce, Armstrong says, ‘the focus should be on incomes, rather than the aggregate size of the economy’. Japan’s economy needs reforms to break through the vested interests holding back productivity growth and allow resources to be deployed where they will lift productivity.

In his analysis of public opinion polling data, Tobias Harris notes that disapproval of Abenomics has steadily increased to a plurality of ’45 per cent in the latest Yomiuri poll and 47 per cent in NHK’. An Asahi poll found that 69 per cent of respondents assessed Abenomics as having made either little (50 per cent) or no (19 per cent) progress in boosting employment and wages, ‘while only 28 per cent said a lot (2 per cent) or some (26 per cent) progress had been made’.

The Democratic Party has attempted to emphasise the failure of Abenomics, but has itself failed to outline an alternative economic vision the public can get behind. Despite the voters’ loss of faith in Abenomics, many worry that replacing Abe risks worsening the economy.

The opposition parties are attempting to fight back presenting a united front. The Democratic Party of Japan and the Japan Innovation Party, the second and third largest opposition parties, merged in March to form the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is ‘taking the fight to the supposedly impregnable core of the LDP’s power base’ through an unprecedented four-party cooperation deal with the Japan Communist Party (JCP), and the micro-sized Democratic Socialist Party and People’s Life Party, ‘supporting joint candidates in the 32 single-seat districts’, explains Michael Cucek in our lead article this week. Most of the single-seat districts are in regional areas, which have benefited the least from Abenomics. And ‘previously the JCP has stubbornly played the role of spoiler … running its own hopeless candidates, bleeding around 10 per cent of the vote from more viable anti-LDP candidates’.

Democratic Party Chairman Katsuya Okada has also attempted to attack the LDP over the issue of constitutional reform, but gained little traction. This will be the first election, and first opportunity for voters to punish Abe, since the contentious reinterpretation of the Article 9 peace clause of the constitution and the passage in September 2015 of the security-related bills which implemented it. The voting age has also been lowered for the first time from 20 to 18. While it has long been speculated that ‘the arrival of young “nationalist” Japanese voters will help’ the LDP, they are in fact ‘not particularly enthusiastic about Abe’s security and constitutional agenda‘. A number of university students, such as the Students’ Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy group, gained prominence protesting the security-related bills last year. But young and old protesters alike have struggled to maintain momentum and public interest after the laws were passed. Continuing incursions by Chinese boats into the seas surrounding the contested Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands has helped keep negative attitudes toward China live and opinion about the laws mixed.

The LDP has avoided talk of further constitutional reform, including the party’s 2012 draft constitution, which is criticised for ‘prioritis[ing] “order” and “the public good” over “fundamental human rights”’. It has also dampened Abe’s long-held desire to formally amend Article 9. There are legitimate grounds to be suspicious of the Abe Cabinet on both counts. They similarly avoided any talk of security legislation in the December 2014 election, which thereafter became the government’s top priority. The choice of Ise-Shima for the G7 Summit in May — despite the fact that Mie prefecture did not even bid for the hosting rights — was a deliberate strategy by the Abe government to weigh into constitutional politics by quietly sponsoring of the Association of Shinto Shrines and its program of cooperation with the secretive ultra-right Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference). These two organisations are cooperating on the Kempo 1000 campaign to distribute information and petitions through Shinto shrines that seek public support for Abe’s initiative to revise the constitution.

Given the controversy over the security-related bills and reinterpretation of Article 9, it is difficult to see how Abe could push constitutional revision further without eroding his power base. Crucially, pushing constitutional revision would put strain on relations between the LDP and Komeito, as Cucek argues. Komeito is a status quo, conservative, anti-militarist party. Its members are totally unenthusiastic about constitutional revision, particularly of the Article 9 peace clause.

The LDP has ‘been courting like-minded revisionist conservative parties, particularly the regionally popular “Initiatives from Osaka” (Osaka Ishin No Kai) party. These parties could control anywhere from 12 to 20 seats post-election’, Cucek estimates, pushing a possible expanded coalition closer to a supermajority. This scenario would be a nightmare for the Komeito leadership which ‘already expends a great deal of energy explaining to the party faithful the benefits of cooperating with the mildly revisionist LDP’. The deal whereby ‘Komeito voters supply anywhere from 5 per cent to 20 per cent of the votes an LDP candidate receives in single-seat districts’ in return for ‘significant influence over its much larger coalition partner’ risks being upset.