Ruling Party Loses Majority for First Time in Japan Vote : Election: New conservative opposition makes strong showing while Socialists are decimated. Unaffiliated candidates’ victory leaves shape of government unclear.

For the first time in its 38-year history, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party failed to win a majority in the powerful lower house of Parliament in an election that creates a new political framework for Japan.

The outcome in Sunday’s election, however, was better than the ruling party feared a month ago when 48 of its representatives walked out to form alternative conservative parties.

As for the leftist opposition, the results were far worse than it had hoped.

Victories by 30 unaffiliated candidates, who have yet to forge post-election alliances, prevent a precise reading of the outcome.

But the left-leaning Socialists, who had served as the gadfly leaders of the opposition since 1955, were decimated. Falling to their lowest total ever of 70 seats (14% of the total), half of what they won in the last election, they saw three conservative parties take over their traditional role as receptacle of anti-Liberal Democrat protest votes.

The Japan New Party, created last year, plus the two newcomers, the Renewal Party and New Party Harbinger, together won 103 seats (20% of the total), emerging with the potential to form the heretofore missing element in a two-party system capable of carrying out changes in the government. No change has occurred since the Liberal Democrats were founded in 1955.

Despite the stakes, the voter turnout was 67.25%, the worst ever for a lower house election.

For the moment, the results are quite opaque. The 30 new representatives who ran without the endorsement of any party could determine the relative strengths in the lower house, which elects the prime minister.

Japanese newspapers gave divergent estimates of who would side with whom. The Yomiuri newspaper estimated that 21 of the unaffiliated winners leaned toward the Liberal Democrats, but Asahi said only 10 did.

Representatives officially endorsed by the Liberal Democrats won a total of 223 seats. Under the Yomiuri count, the unaffiliated winners could swell the party’s support to 244. By comparison, the opposition--including opposition-leaning unaffiliated winners but excluding Communists--would command 252 seats. Both sides, as a result, would fall short of a majority--256 in the 511-member chamber.

But under the Asahi count, potential totals were 233 for the Liberal Democrats and 263 for the opposition, or seven seats over a majority.

(Communists, who won 15 seats, have been shunned by all other parties, and the party itself has declared it will cast blank ballots if a runoff in the election for prime minister occurs.)

Squabbling and policy disputes, however, threaten to prevent formation of any opposition alliance. If so, the prime minister’s post would be handed by default back to the Liberal Democrats.

Whatever the outcome of the election for prime minister, Japan’s new government is widely expected to be unstable and probably short-lived. Predictions are widespread that another election will be called within a year.

Seiroku Kajiyama, secretary general of the Liberal Democrats, said today that Parliament will be opened in early August and the vote for prime minister held by the middle of next month.

In a meeting this morning, Kajiyama agreed with other party executives that they and Miyazawa should eventually resign to “freshen” party leadership before the vote for prime minister.

Asked about resigning by reporters, Miyazawa himself said today he “could not speak irresponsibly” about his future. He said he could not “quit suddenly” for fear of disrupting national affairs or tearing apart the party’s remaining legislators.

Already, half a dozen possible replacements were being mentioned inside the ruling party. Among them was former Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu, who, ironically, was ousted in 1991 for pushing too strongly for political reforms that the Liberal Democrats opposed.

Kajiyama told a TV interviewer that voters, in retaining the Liberal Democrats as Japan’s largest party, showed they “wanted reform amid stability.” He promised that the party, which just last month squelched enactment of political reforms, precipitating a vote of no-confidence against Miyazawa, would carry them out this time.

“It is unthinkable that any party paying the sacrifice of the loss of this many seats would refuse to carry out change,” he declared. Compared with the 1990 election, Liberal Democrats lost 63 seats, their biggest-ever decline.

Kajiyama said his party will sound out the Japan New Party, which won 35 seats, the middle-of-the-road Democratic Socialist Party (15 seats) and the New Party Harbinger (13 seats) as coalition partners.

Miyazawa on Saturday also mentioned the possibility of ruling through a “policy agreement”--without a formal coalition--with opposition groups he did not name.

The election drew a new map of Japanese politics. The Liberal Democrats’ official candidates held on to most of the 227 seats they were left with after their party split. Socialists accounted for virtually all of the losses--spread throughout all of Japan. The Communists, who fell one seat from their 1990 total, were the only other party to decline.

The big winner was the Renewal Party, led by former Finance Minister Tsutomu Hata and Ichiro Ozawa, former ruling party secretary general. Bolting the ruling party with 36 incumbents last month, the party secured 55 seats--far more than any party has ever scored in its first election.

Should the splintered opposition manage to form a coalition, Hata was regarded as a strong possibility for prime minister.

Another possibility was Morihiro Hosokawa, a former Liberal Democrat governor who launched the Japan New Party 14 months ago. Campaigning against all established parties and advocating dispersal of central government powers, his grass-roots group won 35 seats. Its close ally, the New Party Harbinger, which 10 Liberal Democrat defectors set up last month, won 13 seats. Two other Liberal Democratic defectors ran as unaffiliated candidates.

Hosokawa has fewer enemies than Hata’s right-hand man, Ozawa, who is regarded as one of Japan’s most forceful leaders.

So far, Hosokawa has refused to commit himself to a coalition with either side, although he did express interest Sunday night in heading an opposition coalition.

The support that the Socialists had received in recent years from a growing body of “swing voters” and conservatives fed up with the Liberal Democrats was sapped by the new conservatives.

Before the election, Socialist Chairman Sadao Yamahana declared that his party’s very existence was endangered. Yamahana is expected to resign.

Although the Liberal Democrats won a sufficient base of strength upon which to stage a possible comeback in a future election, the traditional exclusive support they once received from business has ended. All of Japan’s major business federations declared during the campaign that henceforth they will also finance the new “liberal conservatives” in the opposition.

In three by-elections to fill seats in the upper house, Liberal Democrats won two seats to bring their total to 99, or 28 shy of a majority in that chamber. Upper house approval is needed for all bills except the budget and treaties, which can be enacted and ratified by the lower house alone.

Only the lower house is empowered to elect the prime minister.