Japanese Coalition Loses By-Election by Big Margin

Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama’s ruling coalition suffered an unexpectedly severe defeat in the first Parliament-level test of its support Sunday as an opposition candidate won by a landslide in a by-election for a seat in the upper house.

Yuzuru Tsuzuki, 43, a former Labor Ministry section chief who was backed by six opposition parties, won 43% of the ballots cast for seven candidates in Aichi prefecture.

Ruling coalition candidate Jiro Mizuno, 48, a former U.N. staff member, polled a paltry 25%. A female radio disc jockey who condemned Tokyo politicians for transforming the contest into a national power struggle came in a close third with 22%.

“The result creates the image that the new coalition is a weak government,” said Minoru Morita, a respected political commentator.

The defeat underscored the difficulty Murayama’s Socialists and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) had in lining up their diverse supporters behind a single candidate, Morita said. The two parties--rivals for four decades--joined with the splinter New Party Harbinger to take power June 29.

Murayama’s Socialists face bleak prospects in local elections in April and an upper house election in July, Morita said. He predicted that the tripartite coalition would collapse after the July election.

The parties of the opposition, including those run by former Prime Ministers Morihiro Hosokawa and Tsutomu Hata, will gain a “spiritual boost” in their efforts to amalgamate into a single party, or at least into a single negotiating bloc within Parliament, Morita added.

Although pre-election polls showed that Tsuzuki was likely to win, his landslide came as a surprise. Tsuzuki campaigned on a platform of reform: He urged deregulation of the economy and told voters he would improve living standards to bring “wealth that you can feel in your daily lives.” The coalition’s Mizuno insisted that stability is needed to make progress.

The by-election was called after courts stripped a Democratic Socialist incumbent of his seat for lying about his educational background in information officially submitted to election authorities in 1992.