Four years into writing sporadically about Japanese politics, the overall impression is that there’s a tremendous amount of noise, a steady drumbeat of events that look interesting and impactful at first glance but turn out to have meant nothing. Bureaucratic and cabinet-level scandals are common; election days are common (there’s a general election, upper house election, or party leadership election literally every year); and the proliferation of smaller parties all doing their own thing means there is a lot of news. But so little ends up mattering that you might as well ignore it altogether. And indeed, most Japanese do.
Even by those standards, the events of September 2020 seem like they should matter. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, literally the only man I’ve seen atop the country throughout my political consciousness, was officially replaced by Yoshihide Suga, his faithful right-hand man. On the opposition benches, the DPP merged into the Constitutional Democratic Party, becoming the first opposition party since 2012 to have over 100 MPs in the lower house. (For reference, the LDP has 284.)
The conventional wisdom is that neither move will have an immediate effect: Suga will govern like Abe, and the opposition still has little support (or even recognition) from voters. But what about the medium-term?
This is a thorny question to answer, since there is exactly one previous example of an opposition party outright defeating the LDP (so there are no “patterns” to be found). And because this level of single-party dominance is rare in other countries, it’s hard to make international comparisons as well. But I can try.
PM Suga: A clear path to a 5-year term
The goodwill accorded to Shinzo Abe does not simply transfer to his successor. Abe had the sweeping and easily recognizable policy agenda of “Abenomics”, projected stability after a chaotic period of rotating leadership, and was recognized and respected on the world stage. The latter two reset to zero once Abe is gone. As for policy, he explicitly ran on keeping Abenomics going — debates during the party leadership election took on the tenor of Suga defending Abe as his opponents pointed out his shortcomings.
Meanwhile, Abe’s political capital earned him passes from a long string of controversies and scandals (the constant “noise” of news mentioned above), but a less-known quantity like Suga might find himself overwhelmed by them, in the way that Abe was the first time he was prime minister (2006–07). This is the logic to the “3+1 Rule” of re-election, i.e. that leaders rarely win a fourth term and parties rarely win a fifth term, which I write about here. (Given the short space between elections in Japan, 3+2 is also quite plausible.)
But all this says is that Suga won’t last as long as Abe. If Suga does manage 3+2, then this is only a middling performance by Western standards; in Japan, lasting a term and a half is impressive. I predict it nonetheless, because the LDP since the 2000s has resembled the parliamentary parties of Westminster countries more than the factious, squabbling LDP of yesteryear.
It’s worth mentioning the various initiatives that Suga’s undertaken since his election, like bringing down mobile phone charges, covering infertility treatment under public insurance, and planning a zero-carbon society by 2050. He seeks his own set of policy accomplishments, even as he broadly continues along the same path as Abe. Yet the problems caused by Abenomics will continue to linger, re precarity of work, rural depopulation, the low birthrate, and so on, and this will mutate into a desire for change after enough time.
But the LDP as a party will probably be able to stage a “hard reset” (see the post linked above) after Suga. They can flip to a different leader with an entirely different language of values and set of priorities (like Shigeru Ishiba, whom Suga defeated in the leadership election), or someone with the charisma to reignite the party’s momentum (like Taro Kono, the social media-savvy Minister of Administrative Reform).
In short – Suga is in no danger of losing the general election that will happen in the next year (3+1, after all), and the opposition would have to play all of its cards perfectly to have a shot at the 2022 upper house election. 2025 is the point at which I’d put Suga as more likely to lose than win, leading the party to seek a change in management. Speaking of which:
The other side of the equation
Due to last month’s merger, we may now see a larger and more confident CDP, but as the graphic at the top shows, mergers don’t predict success on their own. The 2003 merger of the Liberals and Democrats was successful, but the 2016 merger of the Democrats and Ishin failed. This time, you can see parallels of both: like 2003, the new party kept the old party’s name and leadership team, whereas the Minshintō born in 2016 had to rebrand from scratch. But like 2016, this was an incomplete merger, with some DPP members opting to stay out.
Indeed, the post-merger CDP still faces a lot of competition. On its own turf of the liberal-left, there is the Social Democrats, the new DPP, and the economic-populist Reiwa party, and within the opposition as a whole, there are also the Communists and the reformist-right Ishin. Past cases where the LDP was defeated involved alliance of the liberal-left and the reformist-right, including the brief coalition in 1993 and the post-2003 Democratic Party, but the CDP isn’t close to encompassing this coalition today.
And the reformist-right, now in the form of the Ishin Party, is enjoying a bit of a moment: the charismatic Ishin Party governor of Osaka received a spate of good coverage in the spring due to his management of the coronavirus. Recent elections in Tokyo see the party making ground, gaining roughly the same vote share as the CDP. There seems to be an electorate that desires change, particularly a new generation of leaders more fluent in the language of diversity and social equality, but isn’t ready to trust the left, mostly due to foreign and security policy.
Toward a united opposition
I see two ways of getting out of this. The first is simply that the CDP will mutate on its own to accommodate Ishin voters — cut off ties with the Communists, clearly declare its foreign-policy vision and goals, include political and institutional reform in its program, and find a new and shiny leader who can rhetorically combine both parties’ values. The party has already drifted from pure culture-war toward a better economic agenda, just as a natural reaction to the shortcomings of Abenomics and through the policy trial balloons of other parties. By this reading, the further passage of time is all they need to flesh out an electorally-desirable agenda and sell it to the people. Call this the “Tony Blair option” (the bottom option in this diagram).
The second option is that the CDP and Ishin negotiate a formal pact to run elections together and then govern together, recreating the liberal left-reformist right coalition of previous decades (the middle option in the diagram). Liken this to the Fine Gael-Labour alliance in Ireland, or the Ampelkoalition (social democrats + greens + liberal right) in Germany. There are parallels to the LDP-Komeito alliance on the other side of the aisle, which also began as an improbable marriage between a conservative nationalist party and a centrist pacifist party that had spent decades opposing it. But the Komeito, rooted in a religious organization, faced little risk of losing its supporters; CDP and Ishin both appeal to non-aligned floating voters who are far more likely to desert.
It’s hard to imagine this second scenario materializing, but on the other hand, it’s a tough challenge for the CDP to simply outcompete Ishin. Ishin has a decade of experience running Osaka, which provides them with a solid voter base, consistent media coverage of its charismatic leadership, and a vague aura of competence. The CDP… has none of this. Some MPs have governing experience from during the discredited Democratic government; the rest have experience yelling about Shinzo Abe on camera.
I suspect this is another thing that time will solve on its own. A clever CDP will try a bunch of different strategies and readjust after each. Some allege that the CDP, like the Socialists of old, are comfortable staying in opposition forever and yelling insults from afar, but I doubt this — the Socialists had an easy time taking down bad Prime Ministers due to the LDP’s vicious infighting, but the present-day LDP is different, and I think the CDP understands that the ballot box is the only way to force any change or even basic accountability.
So there we go. Back in 2018, I wrote that “whether [the CDP’s] ideas and strategies can resonate among the public will be the defining question of Japanese party politics in the coming decade. ” I’m sticking with that assessment, even as that article broadly seems breathless and triumphalist now. Don’t expect the complete dominance that Shinzo Abe enjoyed to continue much longer, but don’t expect the LDP to go down without a fight either.
