LDP Losses: October 2024 Japanese Election Ends the “Neo-1955 Setup”

The LDP Takes a Lashing

Japanese politics are undergoing a major change. The October 27 general election has taken the Liberal Democratic Party and its junior coalition partner Kōmeitō from a preelection total of 279 seats in the House of Representatives—comfortably above the 233 mark required for simple majority rule in the Diet—to just 215 seats shared between them.

The electorate has made its choice clear, rejecting the control that the ruling parties have enjoyed since the 2012 general election. The LDP was the primary political force from 1955 up through the 1990s; now that its sole majority control of the lower house is gone, it feels like the dawning of a new political era marking the end to its latest decade of stable control. Moves are now afoot to determine the shape of the political landscape from 2024 onward.

The conventional wisdom heading into this contest said that the LDP was destined to go down in defeat, and indeed there is little surprise at the outcome. It goes without saying that the primary driver of the party’s dismal performance has been its slush-fund scandal, centered on its former Abe faction, and its failure to address this issue in ways satisfactory to the electorate.

When Prime Minister Kishida Fumio (in office from 2021 to 2024) announced he would not seek reelection as president of the LDP, thereby relinquishing the office of prime minister, the party leadership election saw an unprecedented nine candidates step forward to fill his shoes. In the end, the party membership went with Ishiba Shigeru, a choice from outside the party’s mainstream who promised to bring a fresh face to the organization and help it through its latest crisis. But the public was not so forgiving, as was made apparent in the general election he called soon after taking office.

This lack of forgiveness was particularly clear in the late days of the election period, when it became known the party members from whom the LDP was withholding official sponsorship on the basis of their roles in the slush-fund scandal would still enjoy party largesse in the form of ¥20 million payments to the local offices supporting their campaign efforts. This was something that voters found inexcusable.

Major LDP setbacks in national elections have tended to follow a similar pattern. Following some party scandal, the “soft conservative” portions of the base are stripped away, and many voters who previously supported the ruling party opt for opposition candidates instead. Exit polls carried out after the October 27 vote by Yomiuri Shimbun and Nippon TV, as reported in the October 28 Yomiuri morning edition, show that the LDP was only able to lock down some 60% of the votes cast by self-professed party supporters.

Looking back, we can see similar dynamics at work in the 1989 House of Councillors election that followed the Recruit scandal, an insider trading incident involving multiple members of the LDP. The same can be said of the 1993 House of Representatives election, which took place following the Sagawa Kyūbin scandal that blew up in the previous year, giving fresh impetus to forces seeking to reform Japanese politics.

The 2009 transfer of power from the LDP to an opposition coalition headed by the Democratic Party of Japan differed in that it was not directly driven by scandal; it was, however, brought about by a broad-based desire among the electorate to vote for “someone other than the LDP,” even if the main motive was not to support the DPJ in particular.

The common strand running through all these upheavals has been the desire of voters to put the LDP’s feet to the fire. Following the latest contest the LDP does indeed remain the number-one party in the lower house, but its membership lead over the main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, which was more than 150 seats before the election, has been closed to just 43. This has been a punitive vote to match what the electorate subjected the LDP to in the 1989 upper house election.

The LDP strove mightily this time to paint Ishiba’s rise to power as the emergence of an “opposition force within the party,” the pendulum swinging back toward positions indicating a “pseudo change of power” within the single ruling party. In this case, though, the swing of the pendulum to a relatively ineffectual player like Ishiba had little impact. Ishiba’s rushed decision to dissolve the Diet and call an election is a perfect illustration of this; rather than going his own way to demonstrate his firm control over the party he now led, he walked away from his previous statements and went along with the consensus desire to move to an election right away. Voters saw this about-face for what it was, and their decisions at the ballot box became a referendum on what the LDP had done so far, rather than a vote of confidence in its future.

The Pressure Is On

Ishiba Shigeru himself defined his party’s success in this election as whether it and its junior coalition partner could retain a majority of the seats in the chamber. Having failed to accomplish this, it will be difficult for him and others in the party leadership to avoid taking responsibility for the loss. On October 28, the day after the election, Ishiba appeared at a press conference where he indicated his intention to remain in office as prime minister, noting that he had met with the leader of junior partner Kōmeitō to confirm the parties’ plan to maintain their coalition at the center of any new government.

Prime Minister Ishiba’s next moves will be to firm up his grip on power—replacing cabinet members who lost their Diet seats, making decisions on LDP official positions like that of head of Election Strategy Headquarters, vacated by Koizumi Shinjirō after the party’s shellacking, and so forth. All this will need to take place by the time the Diet convenes for its upcoming extraordinary session, around November 7. But these steps may not be enough for Ishiba.

Indeed, the pressure is on for him to make more dramatic changes. Reports are already floating that he will step down as prime minister to take responsibility for his party’s heavy losses, and intraparty machinations are likely to pick up pace, including potential moves to elevate Ishiba’s LDP presidential contest rival Takaichi Sanae to the party’s top post, with an eye on the House of Councillors election expected by the summer of 2025. It also seems likely that Moriyama Hiroshi’s announcement that he intends to continue in his post as LDP secretary general will invite strong criticism from the membership outside of the party’s mainstream.

For Ishiba to remain prime minister, he will first need to obtain the approval of his own party. Next he will have to be voted in as premier in a plenary session of the House of Representatives. If he cannot obtain a majority of the votes in the initial round, it will result in a runoff between the top two vote-getters in the Diet contest. In the past this has resulted in lengthy quagmires like the 40-day struggle in 1979 to choose between Ōhira Masayoshi, the eventual victor, and Fukuda Takeo, another candidate from the LDP.

Within the ruling party, the process of selecting Ishiba over Takaichi as LDP president resulted in a deeply felt dynamic positioning his supporters as the mainstream and her backers as the outsiders in the party’s politics. There are undeniably tensions remaining due to this. Officials from the former Abe faction did not receive formal LDP backing in the October 27 election, and party members implicated in the slush-fund scandal were not listed as eligible for proportional-representation election to the Diet, meaning that if they did not win their single-seat races there was no chance of making it in on the PR vote. As a result, 27 of the 44 candidates in this group lost their seats. Powerful forces of discontent are welling up now.

Whether Ishiba stays at the top or leaves the Kantei behind, the LDP and Kōmeitō will need to grapple with the task of restructuring their coalition as a minority government. Even if they reach out to candidates who did not receive official approval during the election to bring them back into the fold, they cannot achieve the 233 seats needed for majority rule in the lower house, making it a tall challenge to get legislation and budgetary measures passed. Assuming that the number-two party, the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, is unable to cobble together its own broad opposition coalition to reach the majority mark, the LDP will remain the top player in the chamber, working with Kōmeitō and other parties to keep its administration in motion.

On the policy front, the forces in relatively close alignment with the LDP include Nippon Ishin no Kai (which took 38 seats in the October 27 contest) and the Democratic Party for the People, with 28. This opens several paths to the LDP, which might (1) establish a coalition government together with them, including their members in the cabinet; (2) forge a policy cooperation agreement with them, calling on them to take part in a coalition grouping not involving cabinet membership; or (3) engage in a partial alliance with them, cooperating as needed to pass legislation in selected policy areas.

However, both the DPFP and Ishin have stated that they are unwilling to form a coalition with either the LDP/Kōmeitō pairing or with the CDPJ. Prime Minister Ishiba, too, at his October 28 press conference noted that he does not foresee a new coalition bringing any opposition parties on board. This leaves only the latter options above, and the key will be how well Ishiba’s LDP can engage in non-cabinet-based cooperation and partial alliances with these other players. It will take a steady, experienced political hand to coordinate any such relationships, and their failure would likely lead to the implosion of the LDP-run administration.

Instability and Extremism at the Edges

All in all, 2024 has been a milestone year for Japanese politics in the postwar era. The general form of the political landscape the country is in today took form in 1955, when the conservative forces of the Liberal Party and Japan Democratic Party joined to create the LDP. With the exception of a brief coalition in the early 1980s with the New Liberal Club, the party wielded majority control of the House of Representatives until it was finally sent into the opposition in 1993.

This “1955 setup,” first described as such by the political scientist Masumi Junnosuke, was also called the “party and a half” system, with the LDP being a single full-strength party and the main opposition Japan Socialist Party only amounting to about half of its strength for much of the era, flanked by other opposition forces like Kōmeitō, the Democratic Socialist Party, and the Japanese Communist Party. In 1993 Hosokawa Morihiro took the helm as prime minister of the first non-LDP government in decades; he was followed in 1994 by Hata Tsutomu. Their time in government was short-lived, though, as the LDP in 1994 joined with the JSP and New Party Sakigake to return to power, with the Socialists’ Murayama Tomiichi installed as prime minister. It appeared that Japan had entered a new era of flexible coalition politics.

In 1996 the LDP regained its primacy as Hashimoto Ryūtarō became premier. It would then remain in control until 2009, when the DPJ took power, holding onto it for three years and three months until the 2012 return of Abe Shinzō (previously prime minister for a short term in 2006–7) to the Kantei. The dozen years following that, with an LDP displaying unrivaled strength on the political scene, have been labeled the “neo-1955 setup” by University of Tokyo Professor Sakaiya Shirō.

The latest general election seems to have brought an end to this period as well. It remains to be seen how, or whether, the LDP and Kōmeitō will participate in an administration going forward, but the framework in place so far is unquestionably gone. This is the beginning of the “2024 setup.”

Ishiba’s LDP, treading an increasingly center-right path, and Noda Yoshihiko’s center-right-leaning CDPJ are clashing at the core of Japanese politics. As a result of both these parties veering to the same part of the political spectrum, various groups are splitting off from them, to be scooped up on the radical left by Reiwa Shinsengumi and on the hard right by Sanseitō and the Conservative Party of Japan.

Reiwa saw its number of seats climb from 3 to 9 in the election, while the two conservative parties gained a total of 6, having previously held none. This development is one to watch alongside the increasing spread of extremism in political discourse. We may not yet be anywhere near the situation seen in some nations of the West, but there are signs here of growing fragmentation and polarization in Japanese society.

The political landscape today is one with the LDP and Kōmeitō, plus a few like-minded supporters, arrayed on one side against the CDPJ on the other, with additional parties situated to their sides on the spectrum. We may do well to recognize 2024 as the starting point for this new reality in Japanese politics.

What can be said with certainty, though, is that the 1955 setup—and the neo-1955 setup of this century—have crumbled at last. Japanese politics has once again entered an age of instability.

(Originally published in Japanese on October 29, 2024. Banner photo: Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru addresses the press at LDP headquarters in Tokyo on October 28, a day after his party’s drubbing in the general election. © Jiji.)