Until Sunday, Japan’s public had not had the opportunity to pass its verdict on Shinzo Abe, the blue-blood politician anointed prime minister by the ruling Liberal Democratic party last September.
Voters clearly relished the opportunity. In upper house elections, they handed Mr Abe's party a crushing defeat and rewarded the opposition Democratic Party of Japan with a clear majority. It was the first time in the ruling LDP’s 52-year history – only nine months of which it has spent out of power – that it won fewer seats than the biggest opposition bloc.
The DPJ won overwhelmingly, not only in the big cities, where it has always been strong, but also in the countryside, where the LDP has traditionally been all but unassailable. Many well-known LDP senators in former rural strongholds were defeated by political novices, whose main election message was that they were not running for Mr Abe.
By midnight Sunday night, with all but 10 seats declared, it looked as though the LDP would fail to reach 40 seats, much worse than the 44 seats that forced the resignation of Ryutaro Hashimoto, former LDP prime minister, in 1998. The DPJ was projected to win more than 60.
Yukio Hatoyama, secretary-general of the DPJ, said Sunday night: “People have lost trust in the Abe administration. We clearly felt this during the campaign.” He and other members of his party said Mr Abe should resign and the LDP call a general election by dissolving the more powerful lower house. That would mark the long-awaited dawn of two-party politics after years of LDP monopoly, he said.
There were at least three main reasons for Mr Abe’s pummelling. First, his cabinet has become mired in a series of political scandals, many involving dirty money, which called into question the prime minister’s judgment and leadership. Two cabinet members quit and Toshikatsu Matsuoka, farm minister, committed suicide amid a corruption scandal.
On the eve of the election, Norihiko Akagi, Mr Abe’s choice to replace Mr Matsuoka, was fleeing reporters pursuing him over allegations that he had massively fiddled his political expenses. “The politics and money scandal plagued us right until the end,” said Hidenao Nakagawa, secretary-general of the LDP, Sunday night.
Second, Mr Abe, 52, has sorely lacked the charisma of his popular predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, and has failed to convince the public that they should share his political convictions. The youngest prime minister since the war has pushed constitutional revision, patriotic education and breaking free of Japan’s war-related guilt. But polls suggest Japanese people are more concerned about continuing economic problems, especially in poorer rural areas, where five years of economic growth has failed to filter through.
“The Japanese public had absolutely no interest in the themes being promoted by Abe,” said Jiro Yamaguchi, politics professor at Hokkaido university, located in one of Japan’s most economically deprived regions.
The final straw for Mr Abe’s administration was an admission that the government had lost 50m pension records. Although the prime minister was not directly responsible for a problem dating back 10 years, his government’s lacklustre response poured fuel on already flaming passions. The DPJ took credit by bringing the pension shambles to light in the first place.
Mr Abe was Sunday night insisting that he would not resign, saying he would fulfil his promise to the public to “proceed with reform and create a beautiful country”. Takao Toshikawa, editor of Inside Line, a political newsletter, said pressure might still build for him to quit, particularly if the DPJ-controlled upper house passed a censure motion in September when parliament is expected to reconvene.
Hirotaka Futatsuki, a political commentator, said that many of Mr Abe’s enemies within the LDP, including those who regard him as too nationalistic, might be emboldened to mount a leadership challenge. “They are not going to go down with Abe on a sinking ship,” he said. “They will move aside and watch him drown.”
But several LDP heavyweights, as well as Akihiro Ota, leader of Komeito, the junior collation member, said they backed Mr Abe’s decision to stay on. Even Mr Abe admitted that it would be “very tough” and that he would have to learn to work with the opposition DPJ “where necessary”.
Using the sort of bland language that has infuriated his critics and failed to electrify his natural supporters, he said Sunday night: “I will reflect on what I have to reflect on and, when the results are finally in, I will think how to respond.”
