Following the death of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party is facing tricky political questions in his home prefecture of Yamaguchi — and the answers are likely to impact a Lower House district realignment plan that was creating controversy within the party even before Friday.
Abe represented the Lower House’s Yamaguchi No. 4 district, an area that includes the port city of Shimonoseki. Under the election law, if a seat in the Lower House becomes vacant before Sept. 15, a runoff election should be held on the fourth Sunday of October.
However, because the Supreme Court is still hearing a trial related to voter disparity issues in last October’s Lower House poll, the timing of the Yamaguchi No. 4 runoff election will depend on when the court issues its ruling. If it comes on or after Sept. 16, an election would not take place until next April or later.
But that’s not the only complication.
Last month, just days before the campaign for Sunday’s Upper House poll kicked off, a Lower House committee tasked with correcting the urban and rural voter disparity rates for the next Lower House election submitted its recommendations to Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
To reduce the disparities in line with a general formula the government agreed to under Abe in 2016, the committee specifically recommended that 10 rural prefectures lose one seat each and that 10 new seats be added in urban areas, including nine in the Kanto region and one in Aichi Prefecture.
Yamaguchi Prefecture is one of those targeted for a reduction, and it would see its four districts reduced to three. Currently all four seats are held by LDP members. Masahiro Komura represents the 1st district, which includes the city of Yamaguchi, while Abe’s brother, Defense Minister Nobu Kishi, represents the 2nd district around Iwakuni.
Top Kishida ally and longtime local Abe rival, Yoshimasa Hayashi — the country’s foreign minister — moved over from the Upper House last October after over a quarter century serving in that chamber. He is believed to have prime ministerial aspirations, and a district seat in the more powerful Lower House was seen as a step toward consolidating the support within the party he would need to do that.
If Yamaguchi Prefecture loses a seat, however, one of the current representatives could be forced to vacate their district seat and run for a less prestigious proportional seat when the next Lower House election is held, a move seen as negatively impacting one’s political career.
In the hopes of avoiding an intraparty battle for reduced seats in Yamaguchi, especially a struggle between Abe and Hayashi, Lower House Speaker Hiroyuki Hosoda, who previously led the LDP’s largest faction before Abe took over, had been pushing an alternative plan that would take away one seat each from Ehime, Nagasaki and Niigata prefectures and give two seats to Tokyo and one to Kanagawa Prefecture.
So far, Kishida has shown no interest in pursuing Hosoda’s plan. Other LDP veterans with whom Abe was particularly close, including former LDP Secretary-General Toshiro Nikai and current LDP Upper House Secretary-General Hiroshige Seko, have also expressed opposition to the plan to reduce 10 rural seats. Both represent Wakayama, which is another prefecture slated to lose a seat.
After Sunday’s Upper House poll, the next elections for both chambers do not have to take place until 2025. With Abe’s death, the current debate in the parliament and within the LDP over the Lower House’s redistricting — and who the winners and losers will be — is likely to intensify further.
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