Japan Coalition Intact Despite Election Losses

Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama early today offered to resign but then changed his mind, after Japanese voters pushed to the forefront a new opposition conservative party and handed his own Socialists and his left-right coalition a severe blow in an upper house election Sunday, the 71-year-old leader said this morning.

Murayama acknowledged his momentary misgivings after formally declaring that he and his two coalition partners had agreed to continue their alliance under his leadership.

The coalition, he said, managed to win a majority of the seats that were contested, and his own Socialists, despite their worst-ever showing, “won a bare minimum of seats,” he said.

Agreement to continue the coalition was reached in a two-hour meeting in the middle of the night with Foreign Minister Yohei Kono, president of the onetime ruling Liberal Democratic Party--which is now the major prop of Murayama’s coalition--and Finance Minister Masayoshi Takemura, who heads the splinter New Party Harbinger, Murayama said.

Murayama confirmed a reporter’s question about a report that he had offered to resign during the meeting but said “the conclusion is what I announced.”

He said he had decided to remain in office to avoid a political vacuum and tackle measures to energize an economy now in its fourth year of virtually no growth.

Political analyst Soichiro Kawasaki predicted that Murayama, his own party stripped of its position as the second-largest political force in the upper house, will face increasing instability in running the government as elections for the lower house approach. The balloting for that chamber, which elects the prime minister, is expected any time from autumn through next June.

Taking the Socialists’ No. 2 spot in the upper house is the 7-month-old New Frontier Party. It more than doubled its seats in Sunday’s vote and positioned itself to become the second conservative party--after the Liberal Democrats--in a two-party system of politics after decades of single-party domination and, only recently, coalition governments.

Until Sunday’s election, Japanese voters had been forced to choose between the Liberal Democratic Party and the No. 2 Socialists. Few voters, however, considered the Socialists a viable ruling force by themselves, and until political leader Ichiro Ozawa split up the old ruling party in 1993, the Liberal Democrats had enjoyed a monopoly on power since World War II.

This time, the New Frontier Party, with three former prime ministers among its ranks and Ozawa as its master strategist, offered a credible alternative--and many of the disillusioned voters took it Sunday.

But only 44.52% of the eligible voters cast ballots. It was the first time since the end of World War II that the turnout in any national election fell below 50%.

Despite economic woes and social unease caused by a doomsday religious sect accused of spraying poison gas in the Tokyo subways, Japan’s multi-faction parties offered only vague--and similar--policies, inducing boredom among voters. Rising convictions that no politicians are capable of bringing about change also conspired to drive down the turnout.

“I couldn’t make heads or tails of what the candidates were saying. I had no interest from the beginning. Today, the weather was fine. Going to vote seemed like an awful way to waste the day,” said Minae Iwasaki, 30, a part-time clerk. She said she did not vote.

Although a typhoon was blowing through southern Japan, most of the nation was sunny, and families headed for the mountains and seashores--rather than the ballot boxes--on the first Sunday after schools closed for the summer.

The ruling coalition as a whole won 65 seats, a majority of only two among the 126 seats contested in Sunday’s vote.

Murayama’s Socialists won only 16, their worst showing in an upper house election. Their Liberal Democrat partners had 46 winners, 24 fewer than in the last elections. New Party Harbinger, the third coalition member, picked up only three seats.

Including legislators not up for reelection, however, the three parties and unaffiliated lawmakers who support them still control 153 seats, or a comfortable majority of 27 seats in the 252-member chamber.

The upper house approves all legislation except the budget and treaties.

With 40 seats, the big winner was the New Frontier Party, patched together in December from the remnants of Liberal Democrat defectors and other parties that supported the self-styled “reform government” of former Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa.

Most astoundingly, the Frontier’s popular vote surpassed the Liberal Democrats’ by 1.5 million in the proportional representation contests, in which voters wrote by hand the name of a political party on their ballots. Frontier also got 400,000 more votes than the Liberal Democrats in district elections throughout the country.

An NHK exit poll of voters found that 30% of people who called themselves uncommitted to any party had voted for the New Frontier Party, more than twice the percentage for any other party.

But the party, now headed by Toshiki Kaifu, a former Liberal Democratic prime minister, got its biggest boost from the organizational strength of the former Clean Government (Komei) Party, which is supported by the Soka Gakkai (Value Creating Society), a Buddhist lay person’s group, according to analyst Kawasaki. He rated Soka Gakkai’s ability to muster voters as pivotal, particularly in an election with a low turnout.

The results painted a particularly ominous future for the Socialists.

Despite the fact that their leader sits in the prime minister’s office for the first time in four decades, the party’s holdings in the upper house shrunk to 15% of the total from 25%. A poll by the Yomiuri newspaper found that support for the Socialists among voters in their 20s and 30s had plummeted to less than 10%.

Murayama’s abandonment of the Socialists’ leftist policies apparently drove away many of the party’s traditional supporters, while his inability to come up with a new vision kept away any new followers. Despite its dwindling fortunes, however, the party still controls the swing vote between the Liberal Democrats and the New Frontier in both houses of Parliament.

Disillusioned voters also turned to a host of celebrities and offbeat candidates.

A man born in Finland who is a naturalized Japanese citizen almost pulled off the biggest surprise. Running as a candidate without party support for a seat from Kanagawa prefecture, next to Tokyo, Marutei Tsurunen polled 339,484 votes but lost to a Socialist opponent by 32,405 votes.

Speaking in Japanese, Tsurunen (whose Finnish name was Turunen) said that he would seek another opportunity in the future “to contribute to the internationalization of Japan.”

He is believed to be the first Caucasian to run for Parliament.