Japanese elections: what’s next for Ishiba and LDP after the polls?

Japanprime minister Shigeru Ishiba on Monday insisted he would not step down and reached out to potential political allies following the shock defeat of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in the lower house elections.

Analysts were surprised by the scale of the party’s poor performance and concluded election result on Sunday would be disastrous for the fortunes of Ishiba and the LDP. Most of them predicted that Ishiba would no longer hold office until the July upper house elections.

According to analysts, Ishiba, elected party leader only on October 1, may hold office for a shorter period than even former Japanese Prime Minister and LDP leader Sosuke Uno. In 1989, Uno was in power for just 68 days after revelations of his affair with a geisha forced him to resign.

“All polls showed that the LDP would lose seats. I estimated they would lose about 30 seats, so losing 65 seats was a surprise,” said Go Ito, a professor of politics and international relations at Tokyo’s Meiji University.

“A defeat of this scale just shows how angry the public has become with the party, and the biggest problem is the LDP members caught up in the slush-fund scandal,” Ito told This Week in Asia. He referred to the scandal that broke out last year, which involved the extortion of 600 million yen ($4 million) by dozens of politicians and party accountants.

Ishiba was elected party chairman mainly because he was not involved in any wrongdoing and promised the public that he would hold individual party members accountable for the financial scandal. However, his promise was undermined just days before the general election, when the party was forced to confirm that instead of honoring its commitment to withhold campaign funds from politicians linked to the scandal, it had quietly provided financial support to some of them.