In the 1990s the demise of the JSP seemed to be leading to a re-ordered political party system centred on competition between the LDP on the centre-right and the newly formed centre-left Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). The DPJ enjoyed a landslide victory in the 2009 lower house election and took control of the government.

Three-year disaster

The three years the DPJ held power proved a disaster for the party and a godsend for the LDP. Many factors contributed to the DPJ's failure, among the most important being the ineptitude of prime minister Yukio Hatoyama, the effort by Ichiro Ozawa to control the party, the party's bureaucrat-bashing approach, poor handling of the crises created by the Tohoku earthquake and the nuclear disaster at Fukushima. It looked as though the party might be getting its bearings under prime minister Yoshihiko Noda, but by then it was too late.

Since losing power to the LDP in 2012 the Democrats have been at a loss as to how to recover public support. Under chairman Katsuya Okada the Democratic Party, as it is now known, opted to define its goals not in terms of what the party stands for but what it stands against. It is against collective self-defence, against the Classified Secrets Act and against constitutional revision.

Now it has a new leader, Renho Murata, the first female to lead a major Japanese political party. The former model and TV presenter, whose father is Taiwanese and mother Japanese, brings a fresh face to a homogeneous Japanese political world dominated by older men. But she has an enormous task ahead in building party unity and formulating concrete alternative policies, especially on the economy, which is consistently the primary concern of voters. Renho - she goes by her first name alone - will need to convince the public that she has a realistic understanding of security issues and that, if her party held government again, they would not make a mess of it. Escaping the image of a party that stands for nothing but opposing LDP policies will be no easy task.

Shinzo Abe: has criticised his own party for its focus on maintaining power. Bullit Marquez

The Democratic Party's effort to make opposition to constitutional revision the key issue in the 2016 upper house election campaign gained little traction. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe downplayed the constitutional issue and emphasised the importance of sticking to his economic strategy. Democratic Party leaders never articulated an economic policy of their own.

Move to the Right


Now that the LDP is no longer being pulled to the centre by parties on the left, the party's more conservative members are demanding that the party return to its roots and fulfil the vision of its founders. The changing dynamics of party politics in Japan has set in motion the LDP's rightward shift.

The LDP's right rejects the pragmatic, economics-first strategy of the 'conservative mainstream' (hoshu honryū) as an unprincipled betrayal of the party's ideals and goals. Abe, for example, has criticised his party for becoming a 'party to maintain power' rather than seeking to fulfil its original platform - the revision of the American-drafted constitution in particular. Abe believes he has a responsibility to give priority to the LDP's goals as set out by his grandfather, prime minister Nobusuke Kishi, more than half a century ago.

There is no future for the Democrats or any party that defines its raison d'etre in terms of what it opposes and that avoids taking clear positions on difficult issues of national security policy.

Japan's political party system will be re-invented, one way or another. It is possible that reinvention will leave the LDP so strong and the opposition so impotent that Japan evolves into something similar to a one-party system in which the checks and balances essential to democratic governance are drastically weakened. Japan requires the presence of a catch-all centre-left party that offers the public a realistic alternative to the LDP.

The new leadership of the Democratic Party faces the challenge of reinventing the party. The future of Japan's political party system and its political democracy depends on how successful they are.

Gerald Curtis is Burgess Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Columbia University. This article is part of a series from East Asia Forum (www.eastasiaforum.org) in the Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University.

Financial Times