Japanese election and Korea

The results of the general election in Japan on Dec. 16th have left Koreans uneasy. The establishment Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that ruled Japan almost unbroken from 1955 to 2009 returned to power in a landslide victory.

The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which took power in a landslide win of its own in 2009, was crushed and nearly relegated to third party status. The Japan Restoration Party (JRP), conservative reformists led by Shintaro Ishihara, the ultraconservative governor of Tokyo, and Toru Hashimoto, the anti-establishment reform mayor of Osaka, debuted as a strong third party. New splinter and traditional left-wing parties lost support.

Together, the results mean that Japan has taken a right turn, particularly in national defense and foreign policy. The leader of the LDP, Shinzo Abe, is a former prime minister known for his nationalistic stance. Ishihara sits even further to the right and remains the most controversial and divisive figure in Japanese politics today. The LDP, the Restoration Party and the small center-right Your Party jointly control 366 seats, or 76 percent of the House of Representatives.

The combined power of nationalistic parties opens the door to a revision of Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan for the first time since it was adopted in 1947. Article 9 states: “Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.”

Since the 1990s, conservatives within the LDP have discussed revising the constitution, but the strength of opposition parties and an alliance with New Komeito Party in the 2000s deprived the party of the super two-thirds majority in both houses of the Diet required to submit proposed revisions to a national referendum.

The postwar party system began to collapse in the 1990s calls as dissatisfaction with the status quo grewafter the 1980s bubble burst. Conservative members of the Social Democratic Party (formerly the Socialist Party) and reform-minded members of the LDP migrated to the emerging Democratic Party.

Weak leadership and a sharp downturn in the economy in 2009 gave the Democratic Party a landslide victory and forced relegated the LDP to second-party status for the first time since its founding in 1955. It was a watershed call for change amid economic collapse on the scale of Kim Dae-jung’s victory in 1997 or Barack Obama’s victory in 2008.

After a dramatic turn to the center-left in 2009, what explains the sharp turn to right in 2012? The results of the election have yet to dry but the most logical explanation is dashed expectations. Japanese voters kicked the LDP out of office in 2009 because weak leadership failed to offer an attractive vision for the future amid economic crisis. Voters wanted new leadership that could deal with the overriding issue of the hour: the economy. Instead of new leadership, voters got weak leadership that failed to offer solutions to economic woes; they punished them harshly on Sunday.

The elections of 2009 and 2012 follow a landslide victory for the LDP in 2005. The charismatic Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi provided strong leadership and implemented reforms that stimulated economic growth and led the party to victory. The LDP’s popularity began to decline after Abe became prime minister in 2006. His push for revision of Article 9 in 2007 was highly divisive and left most of the public alienated.

For the past 10 years, then, Japanese politics has been unstable but the trend is clear. Voters want change and leadership that produces improvements in the “street economy.” They have little time for political infighting and flag waving. Failure to deliver will produce another wave election in the future, forcing the LDP out of power.

For Korea, the series of wave elections in Japan ironically implies stability because as long as voters are focused on the economy they have little interest in the issues that cause friction between the two countries. Abe may push to revise the Constitution but such a push would alienate voters just as it did in 2007.

More interesting for Korea is the decline of left-wing and center left-parties. Including the Democratic Party, center and center-left parties have 16 percent of the seats in the House of Representatives. The traditional leftist Social Democratic Party and Communist Party have only 10 seats, their lowest combined number in history.

On the surface, this suggests a clear rightward shift but it is really part of the same trend that has created three wave elections in a row: a call for a new politics that addresses issues of today instead of ideological debates of the past.

The writer is a professor at the Department of Korean Language Education at Seoul National University. Email him at fouser@snu.ac.kr. <The Korea Times/Robert J. Fouser>