Abstract
Since the Liberal Democratic Party’s return to power after the 2012 election, the weakness of the opposition parties is one of the most important storylines in Japanese politics. The collapse and fragmentation of opposition forces between the 2014 and 2017 elections is integral to understanding the LDP’s victory in 2017. The 2014 opposition leaders, the Democratic Party of Japan and Ishin, were supplanted in 2017 by two parties created just prior to the election: the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDP) and the more conservative Party of Hope.
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Notes
- 1.
Pekkanen and Reed (2016): 62. The Third Force parties had been the Japan Restoration Party, Your Party, People’s Life Party, and Party for Future Generations.
- 2.
Ishin still maintains its base in Osaka and, to a lesser degree, the surrounding Kinki region. The election left the DP in the upper house and local governments untouched and several members, primarily those who ran as independents, maintained the party organization in the lower house.
- 3.
The name changes of Ishin are particularly confusing. The party was formed in Osaka as the Osaka Restoration Party (Osaka Ishin no Kai) and that party went national for the 2012 House of Representatives (HR) election as the Japan Restoration Party (Nippon Ishin no Kai), including a merger with a small party led by ex-Tokyo Governor Shintarō Ishihara. In September 2014, the Japan Restoration Party absorbed defectors from Your Party (who had first formed the Unity Party as a transitional step) and was renamed the Japan Innovation Party (JIP). The JIP lost defectors who formed the Party for Future Generations, which would later become Kokoro. So the party that we call Ishin in this volume is a more or less direct descendant of the Osaka Restoration Party.
- 4.
Renho was born in Taiwan and the name is thus originally the Chinese Lien-Fang, pronounced Renho in Japanese. Her Japanese family name is Murata but she goes by Renho.
- 5.
The party name of Tokyoites First in Japanese is Tomin Fāsuto. “Tomin” refers to the residents of Tokyo, so “tomin” first meant putting the interest of Tokyo voters ahead of partisan considerations.
- 6.
Most of the election districts for prefectural assembly elections are held in multimember districts. If a district has X seats, the top X candidates win seats while those at X + 1 and below lose. The Kōmeitō vote tends to be very stable, but the same number of votes can produce an X finish win or an X + 1 finish loss depending on the distribution of the votes among the other candidates.
- 7.
It became clear after the election that Maehara knew that Koike would not accept all of the Democrats into her Party of Hope in late September at the latest (Asahi November 19, 2017).
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Pekkanen, R.J., Reed, S.R. (2018). The Opposition: From Third Party Back to Third Force. In: Pekkanen, R., Reed, S., Scheiner, E., Smith, D. (eds) Japan Decides 2017. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76475-7_5
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