The Upper House election ended in a sweeping victory for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ruling coalition. Combined with the seats not contested in Sunday's race, the Liberal Democratic Party-Komeito alliance, along with other forces and independents in favor of a constitutional amendment, secured a two-thirds majority of the 242-seat Upper House, clearing the hurdle for initiating an amendment to the Constitution in both chambers of the Diet for the first time in postwar history.
Whether the election result indicates voters' resounding endorsement of Abe's trademark economic policies that the prime minister sought and claimed to have obtained in the campaign is unclear. What seems evident from the outcome is that even though voters may not be entirely happy with Abenomics, they did not see a credible alternative in the opposition parties.
It was Abe's fourth-straight victory in national elections at the helm of the LDP. But the LDP's gains in Sunday's triennial election, in which half of the Upper House seats were up for grabs, did not match the party's robust performance in the previous race three years ago. The LDP-Komeito bloc won well above the majority of the contested seats — which Abe set as a target before the campaign began — but the LDP alone fell just slightly short of regaining the single-party majority in the Upper House that it lost in 1989.