Upper House election campaigning sees official kick off

UPDATE: The polls are in: Historic loss for Abe, LDP, opposition grabs overwhelming majority

The official campaigning for the upcoming July 29 Upper House election began Thursday in Japan. It will be the first major Diet election since Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his Cabinet were inaugurated in September last year, and political analysts have suggested the election will in effect be a vote of confidence, or as the case may be, no confidence, for Abe.

The outlook from the starting line is however rather bleak for Abe’s ruling coalition, consisting of his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and junior coalition member New Komeito – to ensure a majority in the upper house, the ruling coalition would have to grab 64 seats out of 121, but several opinion polls have for the past few weeks shown that the main opposition party, Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), is taking the lead over LDP.

The focus of the election is expected to be the lost pension payment records scandal, a heavy burden for the ruling LDP, and the transparency of political funds, in Japanese referred to as “politics and money”. Abe is also expected to raise the revision of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, the “No War Clause”, as an issue.

Except for the missing pension records, LDP has been shaken by several other recent scandals. In May, Farm Minister Toshikatsu Matsuoka committed suicide amid a political funding scandal. In July, Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma resigned over an insensitive comment about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the same month Matsuoka’s predecessor Norihiko Akagi found himself indicted over multi-million yen expenditures filed for a campaign office that was not in use. Still, the polls show that the opposition has only been moderately successful in capitalizing on the public anger with the current government.

DPJ leader Ichiro Ozawa has nonetheless upped the stakes by announcing that he will retire from politics all together if the opposition does not gain a majority of the seats. Abe, on the other hand, has refused to set a specific target for the number of seats his coalition should be aiming for.

In the election, less than half of the Upper House’s 247 seats are up for grabs – 73 in prefectural constistuencies and 48 allocated to proportional representation blocs – in total 121 seats. Upper House election’s are held every 3 years, and approximately half of all seats are up for the election.

According to a Yomiuri Shimbun survey carried out Tuesday, 377 people from 11 parties or factions are registered to run in the election; 83 of them coming from LDP, 80 from DPJ, 63 from Japan Communist Party (JCP), 23 from the Social Democratic Party (SDP); 23 from the People’s New Party (PNP), 3 from New Party Nippon (PNP), and 80 other candidates are running either as independents or for minor parties.

No matter the outcome, Abe can always comfort himself that the ruling coalition still holds a two-third majority of the seats in the more powerful Lower House.