Elections in Japan: Man with plan

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Looking for a summer bonus

SIX years ago, during his first, dismal term as Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe championed the nationalist but spacey slogan of wanting to build a “beautiful country”. All voters could see, however, was a gaffe-prone cabinet and a struggling economy. In 2007, in an election for half of the 242 seats in the upper house of the Diet, they dealt Mr Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) a crushing defeat at the hands of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). Mr Abe was soon gone, and just two years later the LDP was evicted from government altogether.

Now, campaigning for an upper-house election again, on July 21st, Mr Abe talks of little but livelihoods and the economy. On the stump in Yamagata prefecture, a farming heartland in the north of Japan’s main island, he goes into excruciating detail about companies’ summer bonuses and boasts of Japan’s strong growth in the first three months of the year (an annualised 4.1%)—all to wild applause.

Mr Abe likes to acknowledge that it was not so much his party that won the general election bringing the LDP back to power last December. Rather, it was the DPJ that lost it: after its euphoric victory in 2009, it made a hash of government. Yet now voters appear to warm to the LDP on its own merits. Despite the party’s history of tending to vested interests, it has taken up the economic concerns of a broader slice of the population. In particular, the fizz of “Abenomics”, the programme of monetary easing, fiscal stimulus and structural reforms, has caught on with the country. Businesses large and small, along with their employees, are the loudest cheerleaders for the economic revival plan.

So uncannily high and stable is the popular support for Mr Abe’s government in opinion polls, that Shisaku, a wry blog on Japanese politics, wonders whether the LDP is replicating thousands of supporters in a biocomplex under its Tokyo headquarters. Mr Abe’s cabinet is the first in two-dozen years to have had rising approval rates for three straight months after taking office, according to the Yomiuri Shimbun, the country’s biggest newspaper. Some 57% of Japanese approve of the cabinet today, according to the public broadcaster, almost twice the typical rate for Japanese governments at the same stage (and much higher than Mr Abe’s first one).

Such popularity gives the LDP every chance of winning back control of the powerful upper house, allowing the government more easily to bring in deep-seated changes. Supply-side measures such as making the labour market more flexible are the most far-reaching part of Abenomics, but they require radical legislation.

Just how big a win the LDP will pull off is the question. Polls for the seats to be allocated by proportional representation suggest that around 40% of Japanese back the party, compared with just 6% for the DPJ. With New Komeito, its coalition partner, the LDP looks likely to win the 63 seats needed to control the upper house. Mr Abe is openly aiming for a 70-seat win, which would allow the coalition to dominate the chamber’s legislative committees. Mr Abe’s dearest wish is to secure the two-thirds majority, including allies, that he already enjoys in the lower house. It would allow him radically to revise the meek constitution imposed by America after Japan’s wartime defeat. It is a key part of his dreams for a “beautiful country”. Yet the electoral arithmetic looks too daunting, for he would need 92 more seats.

The country’s mood is not uniformly in favour of Mr Abe’s economic ideas. A gap is opening between urban voters and rural ones living far from the luxury-car salesrooms and stockbrokers’ bars where the atmosphere is most buoyant. In the countryside farmers threaten to punish the LDP for Mr Abe’s surprise decision in March to join talks on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a regional free-trade agreement which they say will damage their livelihoods. Japan is due to enter talks on the TPP just two days after the election.

In rural Yamagata, Yasue Funayama, a popular incumbent, formerly of the DPJ, is campaigning purely on an anti-TPP platform. Japan Agriculture, a usually pro-LDP lobby which, with nearly 10m members, is the country’s most formidable vote-mobilising machine, is backing Ms Funayama against a weaker candidate from the LDP. Yet thanks to Yamagata’s urban factory workers—and to Mr Abe’s popularity—the LDP may yet scrape in.

Along with farmers, fishermen have marched in Tokyo to protest against Mr Abe’s economic agenda, in particular against fuel prices which have risen because of the government’s efforts to drive down the yen. A popular campaign stop for bigwig LDP politicians this week was Kanezaki, a tiny fishing village on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu. There Yoshiharu Hanada, a squid fisherman, says he remains unimpressed by Abenomics: the benefits are not to be seen. Hiroya Masuda, a former LDP minister for internal affairs who advises the Nomura Research Institute in Tokyo, says the main task will be to spread the fruits of Abenomics to rural and fishing communities.

Though the LDP may be back in favour, little suggests Japanese voters are suddenly more trustful of politicians. Many young people shun politics entirely. Turnout in recent elections has been low. It partly explains how, in 2012, the LDP won its landslide in the lower house with almost 4m fewer votes than when voters tossed it out in 2009.

A second issue is the almost complete absence of opposition to Mr Abe and his party. The DPJ, in a slough of despond, criticises Abenomics while offering little alternative. One potential campaign theme is the rejection of nuclear power, owing to the catastrophe of March 2011, when an earthquake and deadly tsunami led to a nuclear disaster at the Dai-ichi plant in Fukushima prefecture. A narrow majority of the electorate opposes nuclear power even with a new safety regime. But the issue has failed to stir voters. Though Dai-ichi remains closed, the LDP’s plan to restart other reactors that were shut down in 2011 seems not to have affected its support. Concerns over the economy seem to trump anti-nuclear feelings.

As for the DPJ, a party insider says that if it can win more than 20 seats, then at least it retains the right to exist. Should its tally fall below that, the pressure to split or radically reshape itself will become irresistible. For the time being, Japan seems to have paused on its journey towards a truly competitive two-party system, which the DPJ’s victory in 2009 had appeared to promise. Since the war no Japanese prime minister has faced so weak an opposition as Mr Abe does now, says Gerald Curtis of Columbia University. But if Abenomics fails to live up to its promises, voters in some future election may yet treat the prime minister they seem to like so much as harshly as they did back in 2007.

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