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Japan The Liberal Democratic Party in National Elections
Election statistics show that, while the LDP had been
able to
secure a majority in the twelve House of Representatives
elections
from May 1958 to February 1990, with only three exceptions
(December 1976, October 1979, and December 1983), its
share of the
popular vote had declined from a high of 57.8 percent in
May 1958
to a low of 41.8 percent in December 1976, when voters
expressed
their disgust with the party's involvement in the Lockheed
scandal
(see
fig. 9;
table 38, Appendix). The LDP vote rose again
between
1979 and 1990. Although the LDP won an unprecedented 300
seats in
the July 1986 balloting, its share of the popular vote
remained
just under 50 percent. The figure was 46.2 percent in
February
1990. Following the three occasions when the LDP found
itself a
handful of seats shy of a majority, it was obliged to form
alliances with conservative independents and the breakaway
New
Liberal Club. In a cabinet appointment after the October
1983
balloting, a non-LDP minister, a member of the New Liberal
Club,
was appointed for the first time. In the July 18, 1993,
lower house
elections, the LDP fell so far short of a majority that it
was
unable to form a government.
In the upper house, the July 1989 election represented
the
first time that the LDP was forced into a minority
position. In
previous elections, it had either secured a majority on
its own or
recruited non-LDP conservatives to make up the difference
of a few
seats.
The political crisis of 1988-89 was testimony to both
the
party's strength and its weakness. In the wake of a
succession of
issues--the pushing of a highly unpopular consumer tax
through the
Diet in late 1988, the Recruit insider trading scandal,
which
tainted virtually all top LDP leaders and forced the
resignation of
Prime Minister Takeshita Noboru in April (a successor did
not
appear until June), the resignation in July of his
successor, Uno
Sosuke, because of a sex scandal, and the poor showing in
the upper
house election--the media provided the Japanese with a
detailed and
embarrassing dissection of the political system. By March
1989,
popular support for the Takeshita cabinet as expressed in
public
opinion polls had fallen to 9 percent. Uno's scandal,
covered in
magazine interviews of a "kiss and tell" geisha, aroused
the fury
of female voters.
Yet Uno's successor, the eloquent if obscure Kaifu
Toshiki, was
successful in repairing the party's battered image. By
January
1990, talk of the waning of conservative power and a
possible
socialist government had given way to the realization
that, like
the Lockheed affair of the mid-1970s, the Recruit scandal
did not
signal a significant change in who ruled Japan. The
February 1990
general election gave the LDP, including affiliated
independents,
a comfortable, if not spectacular, majority: 275 of 512
total
representatives.
In October 1991, Prime Minister Kaifu Toshiki failed to
attain
passage of a political reform bill and was rejected by the
LDP,
despite his popularity with the electorate. He was
replaced as
prime minister by Miyazawa Kiichi, a long-time LDP
stalwart.
Defections from the LDP began in the spring of 1992, when
Hosokawa
Morihiro left the LDP to form the Japan New Party. Later,
in the
summer of 1993, when the Miyazawa government also failed
to pass
political reform legislation, thirty-nine LDP members
joined the
opposition in a no-confidence vote. In the ensuing lower
house
election, more than fifty LDP members formed the Shinseito
and the
Sakigake parties, denying the LDP the majority needed to
form a
government.
Data as of January 1994
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