Results of the Upper House election and the Koizumi Administration's next move
The Japanese Diet adopts a two-house system comprising the House of Representatives (Lower House) and the House of Councilors (Upper House). Members of the Upper House have a term of office lasting 6 years, and half of them are reelected once every three years. At the previous election held three years ago, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lost seats in the Upper House and was expected to face a tough battle this year.
There were two major issues for the voters to decide in this election: whether or not to support the Pension Reform Law that was recently enacted, and the dispatch of the Self Defense Forces to Iraq. Both were policies that the Koizumi Administration had established and implemented. Attention was focused on the verdict of the Japanese people on these moves.
In the July 11 election, the ruling parties saw mixed results, with the LDP losing the Upper House seats it had held prior to the reelection and Komeito holding solidly on to their seats. On the other hand, the Democratic Party, the top opposition party, dramatically increased their number of seats. This was in sharp contrast to the parties in the middle, namely, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the Japanese Communist Party, which sank sharply. Results showed that the so-called two-party system has moved a step closer to becoming a reality.
The ruling coalition of the LDP and Komeito maintained a majority in the House. It became clear, however, that similar election results three years from now would reverse the power map in the Upper House, with the conservatives being overtaken by opposition parties.
At a press conference to discuss election results, Kiyoshi Sasamori, President of the Japanese Trade Union Confederation (Rengo), hailed the strong showing of the Democratic Party that had increased their number of seats to 50, saying that last year's Lower House election built the foundation for Japan's two-party system, and that a major step forward had been taken with this election. He acknowledged that the next Lower House election might bring about changes in the administration. Hiroshi Okuda, Chairman of Nippon Keidanren, expressed the view that, although the LDP failed to win the target number of seats, the ruling parties would still maintain a comfortable majority in the Upper House as a whole, and thus the results would not affect the government's structural reform strategies. He also called on the government to dig deeper into the content of the reform from now on and focus their efforts on promoting the privatization of postal services and comprehensive reform of the social security system.
In consideration of the opposition parties' ferocious protests that the recent pension reform bill cannot fundamentally reform the Japanese pension system, the government had announced its intention to set up, after the election, a forum for discussing and fundamentally reexamining the overall social security system, starting with its framework. On July 15, it promptly announced that all members of the Commission on Reform of the Social Security System have been decided, including Rengo President Kiyoshi Sasamori, Nippon Keidanren Vice Chairman Taizo Nishimuro and Waseda University Professor Hiroshi Miyajima (Chairman of the Social Security Council's Pension Department), and that the first meeting was planned to be held in July.
The Koizumi Administration is seeing signs that its popularity is waning as a result of introducing pension reform policies that have created the impression that there will be nothing but increased burden on the general public, as well as deciding to deploy the Self Defense Forces overseas to join the multinational forces without providing sufficient explanation to the Diet or to the general public. All attention is now focused on what policies the government will unleash, and how specifically it plans to carry them out, to regain its slipping popularity.
