Japan’s LDP, partner on track for big election win

Reuters /Tokyo/Takatsuki

Conservative former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s opposition Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its smaller ally are heading for a resounding victory in Sunday’s election, winning more than 300 seats in parliament’s 480-member lower house, media surveys showed yesterday.

Abe, 58, who resigned abruptly as premier in 2007 after a troubled year in office, is pushing the Bank of Japan (BOJ) for more powerful monetary stimulus and promises to boost public works to rev up a stagnant economy.

Abe, the grandson of a wartime cabinet minister who became prime minister after World War II, also favours a tough stance against China in a territorial row and loosening the limits of Japan’s 65-year-old pacifist constitution on the military.

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda’s Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which surged to power in 2009 for the first time, could get fewer than 80 seats at the election, the papers said.

The conservative Sankei, whose poll was based on a smaller sample, said an LDP-New Komeito party coalition could even win the two-thirds majority needed to over-ride the upper house, where no party has a majority and which can block legislation.

That could potentially break the political deadlock that has plagued successive governments since 2007. But the paper warned that almost 40% of those surveyed had not decided how to vote. Many voters have become disillusioned with the ruling Democrats who promised to break the “iron triangle” of cosy ties between big business, bureaucrats and lawmakers, nurtured during the LDP’s nearly unbroken half a century rule.

But while voters are returning to the long-dominant LDP, there is little tangible enthusiasm for Japan’s main opposition.

“I feel betrayed by the DPJ which promised to change so much, but achieved so little. They came across as immature, disorganised and ineffective,” said Junko Makita, 59, a housewife in Takatsuki, a city of 360,000 just outside western metropolis of Osaka.

“That said, I’m not putting my hopes up too high for the LDP either, but at least they are more experienced,” she said.