Elections in Japan - The Ousting of LDP

I am rushing but would be remiss, of course, if I did not mention Sunday's landslide victory of the DPJ in Japan which marks an end to a +50 year reign of the conservatives.

from the BBC;

The DPJ has won 300 seats in the 480-seat lower house, ending 50 years of almost unbroken rule by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), NHK TV says. DPJ leader Yukio Hatoyama hailed the win as a revolution and said people were "fed up" with the governing party.

Prime Minister Taro Aso has said he will resign as head of the LDP, taking responsibility for the defeat. Japan is suffering record unemployment and its economy is struggling to emerge from a bruising recession.The DPJ has said it will shift the focus of government from supporting corporations to helping consumers and workers.

and here is the Economist;

IN A land of volcanoes and earthquakes the seismic shift is all too common. But for decades Japan’s political landscape has not reflected the country’s geological uncertainty. A general election on Sunday August 30th should change all that. Opinion polls suggest that when voters go to the polls for the powerful lower house of the Diet (parliament), the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), will trounce the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), thus ending over 50 years of nearly continuous rule.

The magnitude of the defeat facing Taro Aso, the prime minister and LDP leader, is startling. A poll in Thursday's Asahi Shimbun suggests that the LDP’s representation in the Diet could be more than halved to about 100 seats. The DPJ could take as many as 320 of the chamber’s 480 seats.

Needless to say, this is significant not least for its economic ramnifications which I hope that I will have some time to deal with later this week (meanwhile see this by Edward).

Comments

[Ise]

You might feel dismayed later if you expect Japan to change after the election. The DPJ's economic policy is almost the same as the LDP. Above all, the Japanese are now increasingly staying away from the so-called "structural reform", which the former prime minister Koizumi put forward, because the Japanese think that it hasn't brought anything but the pain and is the primary culprit of the current economic downturn. DPJ's chief Hatoyama garnered the large support from the electorate, fiercely attacking the structural reform as LDP's mistake. So, DPJ's policy is going to be identical to the old-style pork barrel fiscal policy, which LDP before Koizumi was very much good at.