ABSTRACT
On 30 August 2009, the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP) was kicked out of office in an earth-shattering election that ended half a century of almost continuous rule by the LDP. While the electoral victory of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in the lower house of the Diet had been anticipated, LDP losses were devastating: the party lost nearly two-thirds of the seats it had spectacularly gained in 2005 under popular Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who had selected fresh LDP candidates to unseat LDP dinosaurs. This unexpected victory revealed deep divisions inside the LDP, especially after Koizumi’s departure. An early warning shock came two years later when the LDP lost control of the House of Councillors on 29 July 2007 – its worst electoral defeat since coming to power in 1955. Whether the defeat of the LDP in 2009 represents a new dawn in Japan’s politics is too early to tell. Previous false dawns had presaged the arrival of a two-party system with alternating governments in Japan, notably in 1993 when factional defections had triggered the fall of the LDP Government for the first time in 38 years. The party was replaced in office by a multiparty coalition made up of all the non-LDP parties, but within 10 months the LDP was back in power, albeit in coalition with two opposition parties and under a different electoral system. The LDP’s defeat in 1993 had also been foreshadowed by previous electoral defeats, notably in 1989 when the party got less than onethird of the popular vote in the Tokyo municipal election and then lost its overall majority in the upper house of the Diet.
