Hot political autumn in Japan

In: Problemy dalnego vostoka, Heft 6, S. 7

Abstract

The autumn of 2021 turned out to be hot for Japan's political sphere. Elections to the House of Representatives were to be held and the chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party was to be elected. The situation was complicated by a bad situation with the pandemic, accompanied by a drop in the ratings of the ruling party, as well as the low popularity of the head of the Cabinet, Y. Suga, which has reached critically low levels. To rectify the situation, the LDP had to take extraordinary measures — elect a new leader of Japan, change the party leadership, form a new cabinet of ministers and hold early elections to the lower house on October 31 with new political ideas and new faces in the party leadership.
In this paper the author tried to characterize the main milestones of this tense political season in Japan, to assess the steps taken by the ruling party and to summarize the elections, which marked the beginning of a new stage of Japan's political development.
The author comes to the conclusion that the reason for the relatively successful performance of the ruling party in the elections was the increased media attention to the election of the LDP president, which allowed it to intercept the agenda from the opposition and win over a significant percentage of swing votes. The election manifests put forward by the new LDP leader's found support among many voters, which was also helpful for the LDP success. In addition, the traditional tactics of the opposition based on the criticism of the misses of the ruling party were practically ineffective in the elections, while a positive program was not presented at all.