Ruling Party Scores Victory in Japanese Election

Despite the worst voter turnout in Japan’s history, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa’s Liberal Democratic Party rebounded from a political debacle three years ago and won a historic victory in a parliamentary election, results showed today.

The victory laid the foundation for the conservative ruling party to recover a majority in the next election in 1995, and it strengthened the position of Miyazawa, who as recently as last March was reeling from two straight defeats in by-elections for the upper house of Parliament.

“We are the party of responsibility. We spoke the truth. And that won the voters’ approval,” Miyazawa said.

His Liberal Democrats seized 69 of 127 seats at stake in the 252-seat upper house. Another winner who ran as an unaffiliated candidate was also expected to join the party.

The party has never before won more than 68 seats in an election conducted separately from a ballot for the lower house.

Three years ago, amid a voter rebellion over a new consumption tax and a stocks-for-favors scandal, the Liberal Democrats won only 36 of the seats at stake and lost their majority for the first time.

The voter turnout of 50.7%--the lowest ever in any nationwide election--underscored the widespread apathy toward politics that was shown in pre-election polls. In one poll, 36% of all voters--and nearly 50% of voters younger than 35--said they supported no party.

The previous turnout low came in an upper house election in 1983, when 57% of the eligible voters cast ballots.

Those who did cast votes seemed more worried about a sluggish economy than enactment of a law to send troops overseas to participate in U.N. peacekeeping organization activities for the first time since World War II.

After leaking word of the impending move on the eve of balloting Sunday, the Bank of Japan announced early today that it was cutting its central discount rate by 0.5 percentage point to 3.25%. The leak was seen as a boost to Miyazawa’s election fortunes.

The Social Democratic Party, which had fought enactment of the peace forces law with “cow-walk” vote-delaying tactics, won only 23 seats, including an unaffiliated winner expected to join the party, compared with 46 seats three years ago. Communists, who also opposed the troops law, won six seats.

It was a particularly stunning setback for the Socialists, who had scored major gains in both the 1989 election and a 1990 ballot for the lower house. They won only three seats more than their all-time-low showing in 1986.

The Liberal Democrats now have only 109 seats in the upper house, still 18 shy of a majority. But the 70-seat victory means that the party needs to win only 57 seats three years from now to regain unilateral control of the upper house.

Upper house members serve six-year terms, with half of them up for election every three years.

For now, the Liberal Democrats will be forced to continue seeking support from the Buddhist-backed Komei (Clean Government) Party, which has 24 seats, to enact legislation. Although the conservatives control the lower house of Parliament, upper house approval is required for all bills except treaties and the budget.

Charges that the peace forces law violates the 1947 constitution, which prohibits the maintenance of armed forces and the use of force to settle international disputes, clearly swayed voters in only two prefectures (states)--Hiroshima, which suffered the world’s first atomic bomb attack in 1945, and Okinawa, the site of the bloodiest ground battle of World War II. In both prefectures, candidates opposed to the law won. The Okinawa winner, however, won by only 341 votes.

In Tokyo, a candidate who ran solely on an anti-peacekeeping platform lost by a margin of more than 350,000 votes.

Sadao Yamahana, the Socialists’ secretary general, acknowledged that appeals against the bill had failed to arouse high voter interest. But he vowed, nonetheless, to continue opposing any actual dispatch of troops to Cambodia, where a massive U.N. peacekeeping operation is now under way.

Miyazawa has said that he hopes to send a contingent of about 700 people, including civilians, to Cambodia by the end of the year.

Not only did the issue fail to fire up voters, but it also destroyed the election cooperation of the Socialists, who opposed it, and the middle-of-the-road Democratic Socialist Party, which supported it. All 22 candidates backed jointly by the two parties under the banner of Rengo (the Japan Trade Union Confederation) were defeated.

Three years ago, 11 of 12 Rengo candidates won, making a major contribution to the first-ever defeat of the Liberal Democrats in the upper house.

“Rengo is finished as a political force,” declared Minoru Morita, a political analyst.

The Japan New Party, a challenge to the established order mounted by a conservative reformist, Morihiro Hosokawa, drew support from 7.4% of the voters and produced four winners.

Thirteen women were elected, compared with a record 22 three years ago.

A lower house election is widely expected by early next year to lay the groundwork for a “double election” for both houses when the 1995 upper house election must be held. Voter turnout--and support for the conservatives--rises when ballots for both chambers are conducted at the same time.