Landslide
Wow.
The LDP, Japan’s dominant political party for most of the past 65 years, has just gotten it’s butt kicked, hard. With 30% of the contests still undecided, the Democratic Party has won 52% of the seats in the all-important Lower House of Parliament (or about 70% of seats decided so far). If they keep this rate up, they could be looking at about 65% of all seats in the house, giving them firm control of government.
This has been pretty clear in coming, but still, it’s quite a pasting.
| Party (Japanese Name) | Seats Won |
| Democratic Party (Minshu-to) | 251 |
| Liberal Democratic Party (LDP / Jimin-to) | 61 |
| Clean Governance Party (Komei-to) | 11 |
| Communist Party (Kyosan-to) | 2 |
| Social Democratic Party (Shakai Minshu-to) | 2 |
| People’s New Party (Kokumin Shin-to | 3 |
| Independent / Other | 10 |
| Not yet decided | 140 |
For those unfamiliar with the Japan Democrats, they are not analogous with the American Democrats; they are more liberal than the LDP, but I do not get the sense that they are flaming liberals or anything. They campaigned on some points similar to the Obama campaign, such as transparency, fiscal responsibility, and generally overthrowing the corrupt bastards in power. They are also free-market, promise to decentralize government and put a good deal of power back into the hands of the people (local governments, from what I can tell). They ran on human rights, pacifism, and a focus on good international relations.
Whether any of this will translate into actual change… we’ll see.
The LDP has been in power since 1955; so for the last 54 years. There was a brief loss of power in 1993 but it was short-lived. I wonder just how much the 2008 US election influenced people. I certainly think it was a factor (including larger one’s of course, i.e. economy etc) in this “throw the bums out” moment.