ANALYSIS: Japanese voters feel betrayed, punish ruling party

By Takehiko Kambayashi Jul 12, 2010, 8:09 GMT

Tokyo - Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan's Democratic Party of Japan lost its majority in the upper house of parliament, in an election seen as a protest by voters against broken campaign promises.

The defeat is likely to make it more difficult for the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), in power since September, to pull the world's second-biggest economy out of its two-decade slump while other Asian countries, especially China, continue to grow and rise in influence.

The DPJ kept only 44 of its 54 contested seats in Sunday's election, which saw half of the seats in the House of Councillors up for grabs, leaving it with a total of 106 seats in the 242-seat chamber.

Even with the remaining three seats of its coalition partner, who just tipped the balance before the election, the DPJ can no longer command the majority needed to legislate.

The main opposition Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which governed for most of the last half-century, took 51 seats, taking them to 84 from a pre-election total of 71.

Your Party, the most popular small party, held 11 seats after the election, up 10 from its previous total of one seat.

The results were seen as a punishment meted out to the DPJ by disappointed voters, many of whom say they feel betrayed by the party, which they expected to be an agent of change.

Critics accused Kan, a former civic activist with neither an economic nor a diplomatic background, of not making good on campaign promises. Recent proposed tax increases go against commitments made by the DPJ ahead of the previous elections in August, they said.

The DPJ, under the slogan 'Putting People's Lives First,' won a landslide victory in August in the more powerful lower house of the Diet, or parliament, ending more than a half-century of almost uninterrupted rule by the LDP.

Many Japanese, frustrated by decades of economic stagnation and eager for change, voted for the DPJ, which pledged to cut wasteful government spending and leave more money in taxpayers' pockets.

But the party's political momentum was quickly squandered when Yukio Hatoyama, Kan's predecessor, flip-flopped on a campaign pledge to relocate a key US military base situated on the southern island of Okinawa.

Trust in the DPJ was further eroded when Hatoyama and party power broker Ichiro Ozawa were involved in a funding scandal.

After both Hatoyama and Ozawa resigned one month before the election, Kan, who replaced Hatoyama, enjoyed approval ratings of around 60 per cent in opinion polls.

But soon after Kan proposed hiking consumption tax from 5 to 10 per cent to rein in mounting public debt, his support rates plunged below 50 per cent.

Yoshimi Watanabe, president of Your Party and a former financial services and administrative reform minister, accused Kan, former finance minister under Hatoyama, of being brainwashed by the Finance Ministry.

The DPJ argued last year that it would make the ruling party much more accountable, putting responsibility in the hands of politicians rather than bureaucrats if it took power.

Kan, Japan's fifth premier in three years, acknowledged his 'abrupt' proposal of the tax hike contributed to the defeat in Sunday's election, but indicated he would not step down.

Without their majority in the upper house, the DPJ and People's New Party, its junior coalition partner, need to seek new allies.

All other parties have previously said they would be unwilling to join the DPJ's coalition, but further political manoeuvring was expected.

In the meantime, the government's inability to legislate in the upper house is set to hamper its efforts to deal with the nation's longstanding problems of underemployment, mounting government debt and an ageing population.