A discontented Japan is likely to return opposition party to power

TOKYO — The Japanese voters who on Sunday will elect a new government are loyal to no party and frustrated with each of the recent leaders to hold power. They are political pessimists facing a choice among a ruling party with an approval rating in the teens, an unreformed opposition party that was booted out only three years ago and a raft of minor parties formed in pre-election haste.

Polls conducted by Japan’s mainstream media suggest that the opposition giant, the Liberal Democratic Party , will easily return to power after this general election, which will award seats in the lower house of parliament. The LDP, political analysts say, has emerged in recent months as Japan’s least objectionable party. With a support rate of 26 percent, it is by far the country’s most popular one.

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Analysts say the broad political discontent stems from the two-decade failure among Japan’s politicians to rejuvenate the economy, curb the national debt and reverse deflation. Though disillusionment here about politics is nothing new, the sentiment has intensified recently as the current government struggles to contend with China in an intense territorial dispute and as the major parties show little interest in following the anti-nuclear wishes held by the majority of the Japanese population.

The election is largely local, with the country divided into 300 constituencies and voters in each district selecting their preferred candidate. The remaining 180 seats are filled proportionally, based on each party’s share of the vote. The party that controls the lower house — the more powerful of the chambers in Japanese legislature, called the Diet— then installs its party president as prime minister.

At least a dozen parties are backing candidates to fill seats in the Diet, and polls strongly suggested that the LDP will capitalize on fractured voter sentiment by winning most of the local races, even when far shy of a majority. Under that scenario, a party with no actual mandate would win in a landslide victory, and Japan’s next prime minister would be Shinzo Abe, a nationalist who already ruled the country once before in what many thought was a woeful one-year term, before quitting because of a stress-induced bowel illness.

He would replace Yoshihiko Noda, of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ).

“The LDP hasn’t particularly done anything exciting to win support, but people have now decided, reluctantly, that it can’t be worse than the DPJ,” Michael Green, who holds the Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in a discussion Monday at the Heritage Foundation. “So they’re going for something different. If they can’t have hope and change, they’ll go for competence. So this is not an exciting hope-and-change election in Japan.”

‘Everything starts now’

Only three years ago — during the previous general election — Japan was hopeful. Its voters had ousted the LDP, the monolith that had ruled nearly uninterrupted for 54 years, and handed power to the DPJ, led by a Stanford-trained math engineer, Yukio Hatoyama.