Japan’s Ruling Party Suffers Setback

Itsuo Inouye/Associated Press

Election workers counted votes in Tokyo on Sunday in the elections for Japan’s Upper House. The governing Democrats trailed the Liberal Democrats.

By MARTIN FACKLER

Published: July 11, 2010

TOKYO — Japan’s governing Democratic Party suffered a stinging setback in midterm elections on Sunday that showed growing voter disappointment with the party’s apparent inability to deliver on promises to revamp the country’s sclerotic postwar order.

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The election, for seats in the Upper House, was widely seen as a referendum on the nine-month-old leadership of the Democrats, who won a historic election victory last year over the long-governing Liberal Democrats, but then got mired in money scandals and a dispute over an American airbase. With most districts reporting final results, the Democrats trailed the opposition Liberal Democrats, failing to win enough of the 121 contested seats to gain a controlling majority in the chamber.

“No one expected it to be as bad as this,” said Naoko Taniguchi, a professor of political sociology at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. “Voters see a leadership crisis.”

The election was another big blow to the party after the sudden resignation last month of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, who faced deepening criticism over his indecisive leadership.

The Democrats are not in danger of losing control of the government, since they have a comfortable majority in the more powerful Lower House. But their failure to control the Upper House could result in a split Parliament, making the Democrats’ promises to strengthen social welfare and assert more control over the nation’s powerful bureaucracy far more difficult to achieve.

Analysts said the vote showed growing doubts about the party’s ability to end the prolonged economic stagnation in Japan, once the powerhouse of Asia. They credited the Liberal Democrats’ apparently strong showing after months of disarray to its still formidable local vote-gathering ability, though the gains also reflected a protest vote against the Democrats.

Opinion polls had predicted a tough race for the Democrats, who suffered as Mr. Hatoyama’s popularity plummeted. The party then voted in a new prime minister, Naoto Kan; his approval ratings also fell after he proposed an increase of the national consumption tax only to waffle about it later, raising questions about his leadership skills.

On Sunday, Mr. Kan took responsibility for the election setback but said he would stay on as prime minister.

“My insufficient explanation was a big reason in this big election defeat,” Mr. Kan said at a news conference.

The Democrats appeared to have won 44 of the 121 contested seats, far below their previous total of 54 and much less than the 60 seats needed to claim a majority in the Upper House, according to N.H.K., Japan’s national broadcaster. N.H.K. used actual vote tallies and its own projections of contested races. The Liberal Democratic Party, or L.D.P., appeared to have secured 51 seats, with the rest going to smaller parties.

Final results were available for about two-thirds of the races. The rest were expected on Monday.

Without a majority in the Upper House, the Democrats may be forced to seek a coalition partner.

One possibility was a grand coalition with the Liberal Democrats, whose election platform was very similar to the Democrats’, including the call for a consumption tax increase. Failure to form a coalition could result in renewed political paralysis, and possibly pressure to dissolve Parliament and call new elections, political experts said.

But a Democratic official said Sunday that the party might instead ask opposition parties to cooperate on a policy-by-policy basis. A likely candidate is the oddly named Your Party, a new party advocating small-government policies that emerged as a distant third on Sunday with 10 seats.

Voters casting ballots at a fire station in Yokohama, a city outside Tokyo, agreed that the Democrats had stumbled since taking office. But they were divided on whether to support them.

Mineko Tokumasu, 79, a tobacco shop owner, said the party should be given a reprieve.

“I think it’s too early to judge the Democratic Party,” she said. “You cannot change something like the bureaucracy in just nine months.”

Other voters said they were already fed up with the country’s new leaders.

“I voted for the Democratic Party last time, but they did not live up to expectations,” said Yoshifumi Shimura, 56, a transportation industry worker who said he voted for the L.D.P. this time. The Democrats “just talked about ideals but lacked the skill to make them reality,” he said.

In fact, many had expected this election to be an easy victory for the Democrats, who had seen a rebound in popularity after Mr. Kan, a plain-spoken former social activist, replaced the unpopular Mr. Hatoyama.

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But Mr. Kan saw his approval ratings quickly drop, first by proposing a tax increase before an election — a political no-no in almost any country — and then by seeming to vacillate when the proposal proved predictably unpopular among voters.

The apparent flip-flopping appeared to raise broader doubts here about whether the inexperienced Democrats, an alliance of L.D.P. defectors and former socialists who once seemed permanently relegated to Japan’s opposition sidelines, could mold themselves into an effective governing party.

Mr. Hatoyama’s and then Mr. Kan’s inconsistencies appeared to fan fears of what some political experts characterized as a leadership crisis in Japan, where voters are eager to find someone to point a way out of the country’s seemingly intractable decline.

“Kan’s handling of the tax issue backfired by reminding people of the hapless Hatoyama,” said Jeff Kingston, a politics professor at Temple University in Tokyo. “People here are desperate for leadership, and for change.”

Indeed, this election was already history-making in one regard: This was the first time since the mid-1950s that a party other than the L.D.P. had been the incumbent party going into a national election.

During the campaign, Mr. Kan ran on a platform that called for the strengthening of Japan’s social safety net while using revenue from the tax increase to invest in job-creating industries like medical care and new energy.

He seemed to avoid foreign policy issues after his predecessor was forced to resign over his mishandling of a dispute with Washington over relocating an American military base on Okinawa.

The focus on economic issues appeared to be part of the party’s strategy to regain credibility with voters.

“This election is about whether voters have confidence in the Democratic Party,” said Goshi Hosono, the party’s deputy secretary general.