Japan's Liberal Democratic Party In Search Of Answers

2025-09-02 07:01:25

(MENAFN- Asia Times) After a delay, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) committee tasked with conducting a post-mortem analysis of the party's poor performance in the July upper house elections delivered its report to a general meeting of LDP lawmakers on Tuesday, September 2.

The committee essentially sought to answer three questions, and, in doing so, perhaps offered an implicit answer to the biggest question facing the LDP.

The report first answers the question,“What went wrong in July?” To this question, it gives these answers.

First, the Ishiba government, its approval ratings underwater since last year's general election, sapped the LDP's strength.
Second, the LDP failed at what the report describes as the party's core electoral strategy, winning the support of at least 80% of its own supporters and taking a sizable share of independents.
Third, the party lost the votes of young voters and at least some conservative voters who had supported the party in the past.

The report's next question –“Why did this happen?” – may be more interesting. The report provides nine answers to this question, and, while Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba is not personally blamed anywhere, arguably responsibility for eight of the nine causes can be laid at the feet of the prime minister.

The one exception may be the loss of trust due to political corruption, responsibility for which centered mainly on the former Abe faction and predated Ishiba's elevation to the party presidency. Of the remaining eight, the report is damning, pointing to:

policy missteps, especially the failure to appreciate economic hardships and cost-of-living issues;
a lack of political vision, noting the government's and party's failures to make clear what the party stands for both in response to its 2024 general election defeat and the public's broader feeling of stagnation, particularly among young voters and conservative voters; and
communication failures, including not making more efforts to listen to voters, a careless remark by an upper house member about a natural disaster during the campaign and a communications infrastructure grossly inadequate for the contemporary information environment, noting both the party's failure to use social media effectively to propagate its messages and its inability to combat misinformation and disinformation.

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