Judgement Day for the LDP? Ishiba’s desperate attempts to hold onto reign
Japan’s political scene has been riddled with changes of leadership, media-exposed controversies, and, most recently, a possible end to LDP-governed dominance. It has been a year of uncertainty and rapid alterations.
Ex-Prime Minister Kishida’s term was filled with controversies, freshly working with the party’s ties to the Korean-based’ Unification Church’, rising living costs, record defence spending, and the recent uncovering of a political fundraising scandal. With irrecoverable declines in public approval ratings, this called for an internal LDP election, putting forth current Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba to drive the party in a new direction. Almost immediately, he called for a snap election on the 27th of October, hinting at his ‘new Japan’ agenda and supposedly carrying a very forward-thinking mindset. Nevertheless, opinion polls suggest that the ruling coalition could fall short of a majority after 15 years of the LDP’s uncontested superiority.
Why is this happening? The LDP has garnered a particularly large amount of distaste towards itself this year, a combination of frustration directed toward previous prime ministers such as Abe’s ‘prioritisation of security, trade and industry but ignorance towards equality and diversity’, acts of misconduct within the party, such as through the use of adult dancers by the LDP’s young wing and finally, the so-called “gap in what the public expected him to be as prime minister versus the reality of what he brought as prime minister” when speaking of the current Prime Minister Shigurui Ishiba.
Ishiba’s low female-to-men ratio in cabinet and his highly ambitious pleas to the public to formulate his so-called ‘new Japan’ have not necessarily improved public confidence in his ambitions to separate the LDP from the legacy of Shinzo Abe and its corruption-filled history. On a related note, the discourse surrounding the introduction of a dual surname option for married couples to revise the conservative aspects of the 1896 Civil Code was re-introduced upon Ishiba’s quick retraction of his support to tailor to the party’s influential ultra-conservatives. The requirement for marriage partners to adopt the same surname as their lovers was highlighted by the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, which argued that such a procedure disadvantages females of the family due to the wife adopting her husband’s name in an overwhelming 95% of cases, making it the women who would usually have to sacrifice their family name.
Observing activity forums and netizen reports, this large media response to Japan’s political domain has beneficially introduced more citizens to Japanese parliamentary activities. In a generation where political interest is very low, this could be addressed as a partially positive experience for the future of Japan’s education and government.
New Update: the LDP are set to lose their coalitional majority
Bibliography
https://www.arabnews.com/node/2576843/world
https://japantoday.com/category/national/decline-of-rural-japan-not-our-fault-women-say