Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Liberal Democratic Party is set to regain a majority of Upper House seats for the first time in 27 years after an independent member submitted an application to join the party, LDP lawmakers said Wednesday.
Tatsuo Hirano, who has held a seat in the Iwate prefectural constituency since 2001 and who was the reconstruction minister in 2012 under the government led by the Democratic Party of Japan, told reporters, "Japan now needs continuity of policies. What the LDP is doing is not wrong. I want to contribute to Iwate and Japan as a lawmaker of the LDP."
LDP Secretary General Sadakazu Tanigaki asked Hirano to join the ruling party during talks on Tuesday.
Hirano's switch to the LDP could give Abe more power to push his Abenomics monetary policies and achieve his ultimate goal of revising the nation's 70-year-old Constitution for the first time.
Along with other lawmakers who are supportive of revising the postwar Constitution, the LDP and its junior coalition partner Komeito won a two-thirds majority in Sunday's Upper House election. Still, the LDP itself fell short of an overall majority by just one seat.
Hirano, whose seat was not contested in the election, left the DPJ in April 2013, becoming an independent.
With the addition of Hirano, the pro-constitutional revision parties — the ruling bloc, Initiatives from Osaka and Nihon no Kokoro o Taisetsu ni suru To (Party for Japanese Kokoro) — will have 162 of the 242 House of Councilors seats.
To propose a constitutional amendment and call a national plebiscite on the matter, the support of two-thirds of both houses of the Diet is required. The ruling parties already hold such a majority in the House of Representatives, or Lower House.