The Oct. 22 Lower House election will give voters a chance to hand down their judgment on the nearly 5-year-old administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — and their verdict on whether he should stay in office and continue with his policies. The quick and surprising developments in Nagatacho since he made the decision to dissolve the Lower House for a snap election — in particular the launch of a new party by Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike and the effective disbandment of the No. 1 opposition Democratic Party, with most of its members flocking to Koike's upstart party — have grabbed a great deal of public attention in recent weeks. However, voters should see through these moves and identify what each party stands for in substance so they can make a rational decision at the ballot box. With the official campaign kicking off Tuesday, they have been given 12 days.
When Abe made up his mind last month to gamble on a snap election, he obviously intended to catch the opposition off guard and maximize his Liberal Democratic Party's gains — or minimize its losses — by holding the race while his opponents were unprepared, with popular support for his administration fast recovering after hitting all-time lows just a few months earlier. Hard on the heels of a leadership change, the DP was in tatters with the continuing exodus of its lawmakers. The popular Tokyo governor, whose fledgling local party upstaged the LDP in the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly election in July, had yet to make the much-anticipated move to launch a national party. Abe's emphasis on North Korea's nuclear and missile threats and Japan's demographic challenges as "national crises," and the need for a fresh mandate from voters to address them on a solid political footing, was hardly convincing as a reason for holding a sudden election.
That gamble appeared to have backfired when Koike's new Kibo no To (Party of Hope) quickly developed into the main contender to Abe's ruling coalition by absorbing many DP lawmakers and candidates. Most of the DP lawmakers have effectively ditched their opposition to Abe's security legislation enacted in 2015 to hitch a ride on the popular governor's bandwagon. However, Koike's rejection of DP members who refused to endorse her positions on defense and constitutional revision and went on to establish the splinter Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDP) — along with her own decision not to run in the general election despite heading the main contender to the ruling camp — seem to have already taken some of the steam out of public expectations for her party ahead of the election.