Japan’s House of Representatives Dissolved

Now What?

By Takuya Nishimura, Senior Fellow, Former Editorial Writer for The Hokkaido Shimbun
The views expressed by the author are his own and are not associated with The Hokkaido Shimbun
You can find his blog, J Update here.
October 15, 2024. Special to Asia Policy Point

Japan’s new Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba dissolved the House of Representatives (Lower House) on October 9. All the seats were immediately open for election. The general election campaign begins on October 15, and voting takes place on October 27.
 
With the negative impact of the slush fund scandal, it is predicted that the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) will lose seats. However, the opposition parties have not established an effective framework for cooperation that would outmaneuver the LDP’s leading coalition. The LDP defines its victory in this election as securing a simple majority of 233 seats with its coalition partner, Komeito.
 
Prime Minister Ishiba has long questioned the power of a prime minister to unilaterally dissolve the Lower House. He wrote in his blog in June about importance of learning from the wisdom of predecessors in the House, quoting the words of former Speaker of House of Representatives, Shigeru Hori, that criticized the arbitrary dissolution in 1978.
 
Nevertheless, Ishiba dissolved the House only eight days after he was elected as prime minister. He explained that he thought a new prime minister should be judged by voters as soon as possible. The opposition parties criticized Ishiba for his shortcut, which ignored the custom of pre-election policy discussions in the Diet.
 
The biggest issue in the election is political reform, stemming from the slush fund scandal that led Ishiba’s predecessor, Fumio Kishida, to step down. The LDP decided to exclude members who had received heavy penalties in the scandal from its slate of candidates in the coming general election. Cutting candidates from the slate necessarily will make it harder for the LDP to retain power.
 
Back in April, the LDP found that 85 of its members had failed to report kickback funds from their factions. Of these, 55 planned to run in next general election. Six of the 55 then dropped out. On October 9, the LDP removed 12 of the remaining 49 from the slate. The 12 members had received major penalties in the scandal.
 
The party included in its slate 34 members with minor penalties in the slush fund scandal. The official endorsement of a party is a great advantage in a race for a Lower House seat. A candidate with an official endorsement from his or her party can receive financial support from the party, broadcast his/her opinions through the public TV and radio program, and distribute more flyers than an independent candidate can.
 
The 34 members have, however, lost one benefit: they may not receive “double nominations.” A double nomination means that an LDP member who loses in a single-seat constituency may still run as one of several proportional representatives. LDP members not implicated in the scandal may still receive double nominations. Several members felt that the exclusion from double nominations was too heavy a sanction. To sooth those ruffled feathers, Ishiba excluded himself and other four major positions in LDP board – Secretary General and Chairs of the General Council, Policy Research Council and Election Strategy Committee – from double nominations.
 
The 12 members removed from the LDP slate and the 34 members ineligible for a double nomination are all candidates in single-seat constituencies. Three other members involved in the scandal are candidates for proportional representatives, and they declined to be included in the LDP slate. One of the three is running in a single-seat constituency as an independent candidate, and another will seek election to the House of Councillors next year.
 
Despite Ishiba’s cutting back the slate, there is a trick that may help the LDP. Even after the election, it is not unusual for a party to include victorious candidates as additional members of its slate. Ishiba did not rule out the possibility of adding independent winners to the LDP slate. If the LDP does so, it likely would include some independent winners who originally were excluded from the slate due to the scandal.
 
The opposition parties do not consider the decisions of the LDP to pare down the slate and bar double nominations as meaningful penalties for the members involved in the scandal. “Most of them would be on the slate. It cannot be understood by the people,” said the leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP) Yoshihiko Noda to Nikkei Shimbun. The head of the Japan Innovation Party (Nippon Ishin-no Kai), Nobuyuki Baba, said that the LDP members should testify before the Political Ethics Council in the Diet. The Japan Communist Party (JCP) demanded the resignations of those LDP lawmakers.
 
According to the counting of NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation), LDP fielded 342 candidates (266 for single-seat constituencies and 76 for proportional representatives excluding the double nomination). Komeito has 50 (11 and 39). LDP did not field any candidate in a district where Komeito has its own.
 
The number of candidates of the opposition parties are as follows; CDP: 237 (207 and 30), Ishin: 164 (163 and 1), JCP: 236 (213 and 23), Democratic Party for the People: 42 (41 and 1), Reiwa Shinsengumi: 35 (19 and 16), Social Democratic Party: 17 (10 and 7), and Sanseito: 95 (85 and 10).
 
Most of the JCP’s candidates will compete with CDP or Ishin candidates. It is likely that the votes against LDP will be divided among some opposition parties, but the parties are not working together to defeat LDP candidates. Although Noda hoped to lead negotiations to establish a cooperative framework among the opposition parties, time has run out with the LDP strategy of an early call of a snap election.
 
LDP held 256 seats in the House of Representatives before the general election was proclaimed, and Komeito held 32. The coalition of these two parties thus controlled 288 seats – 55 seats above the simple majority of 233. If this coalition loses 56 seats or more in the election, they will lose the majority. In this event, the coalition will have to add unaffiliated, independent voters or find additional coalition partners. So far, no opposition party has shown any interest in joining the coalition with the LDP and Komeito.
 
The possibility of LDP and Komeito losing the administration is widely estimated as low because the approval rating for the LDP rose after Ishiba replaced Kishida and because the opposition parties have not formed a united front against the leading coalition. This possibility is not zero, however: LDP candidates who had been involved in the slush fund scandal will face very difficult campaigns, even if they are included in the LDP slate. No one can deny a possibility of political turmoil following the election.
 
Explaining the Election System for the House of Representatives
Dissolution of the House of Representatives is made under the name of the Emperor. Article 7 of the Constitution of Japan states that dissolution is one of the acts in matters of state by the Emperor. However, the Emperor does not have political power, and the acts in matters of state are exercised with the advice and approval of the Cabinet. The Cabinet is led by the Prime Minister. So, the provision has been interpreted as vesting Prime Minister with the power to dissolve the House of Representatives at any time.
 
When the House of Representatives is dissolved, there must be a general election of the House of Representatives within 40 days from the date of dissolution under Article 54 of the Constitution. The general election in 2024 will be held 18 days after the dissolution.
 
The House of Representatives has 465 seats. 289 seats are from single-seat constituencies in all over Japan. The remaining 176 seats are from eleven blocks with several representatives that are allocated to parties on pro rata based on the number of votes.
 
Each voter has two votes in election; one is for writing a name of a candidate in a single-seat constituency, and the other is for writing the name of a party (and not an individual candidate) for proportional representatives.
 
In each single-seat constituency the system is first-past-the-post: whoever receives the most votes wins the seat. The winning proportional representatives are selected from the slate of each party, according to the number of seats allocated to them. Each party makes a list of candidates in order of priority. If a party wins 10 seats in a block of proportional representatives, the candidates from number 1 to 10 on the list will take the seats.
 
What makes this system complicated is that one candidate can be nominated for both kinds of seats. A candidate with a double nomination can take a seat as a proportional representative, even if he/she loses the single-seat constituency.
 
Moreover, a party can nominate multiple candidates in the same position on the list of proportional representatives. It is usual that, say, ten or twenty candidates who also are candidates in single-seat constituencies are nominated in the number one position. As between the candidates in this position, the candidate with the smallest margin of defeat in the single-seat constituency takes priority. If candidate A lost by 5 percentage points to his or her opponent, and candidate B lost by 10 percent, A is superior to B when seats are allocated to proportional representatives.