Voting for Japan’s 49th House of Representatives election was held on Sunday and the ballots are still being counted. All results were available before dawn this morning.
As of 2am, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) had taken 253 of the 465 seats on offer exceeding the number required for a single majority. Including its partner Komeito, the ruling party has won 283 seats, exceeding a stable majority. The stable majority is the number of seats needed to operate the Diet in a stable manner and requires 261 seats.
However, the LDP experienced some disruption with several former ministers losing their seats, while the Nippon Ishin no Kai more than tripled its number of seats from 11 to 37.
The representative of Nippon Ishin no Kai is Ichiro Matsui, mayor of Osaka, and the deputy representative is Hirofumi Yoshimura, governor of Osaka Prefecture. The party has gained significant traction in Osaka prefecture.
Following the result of this House of Representatives election, Fumio Kishida will maintain his position as Prime Minister. It is anticipated that the government’s policy toward IR will remain unchanged with Kishida having expressed his storng support in the past.
Osaka prefecture is currently working on an IR bid with its preferred partner, MGM Resorts, and the Ishin party is a supporter of the policy. It now occupies 15 of the 19 seats in the single-seat constituency in an overwhelmingly win, with the remaining four seats held by Komeito.
In a similar vein, Wakayama prefecture, another area pushing to develop an IR, ended up with two LDP and one from the Democratic Party for the People seats, while Nagasaki has three LDP seats and one from the Democratic Party for the People.
Kanagawa, where the recent Yokohama city mayoral election saw Takeharu Yamanaka win and kill off Yokohama’s IR bid, is the home ground of former Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, as well as former cabinet ministers Tari Kono and Shinjiro Koizumi. The LDP only took 11 seats in Kanagawa while the CDP also took 11.
Akira Amari, Secretary General of the LDP, lost his small electoral district race to a CDP member. Amari still wins a seat in the proportional represented constituency, but losing in the single member constituency isn’t a good look for him. The LDP will need to rethink the current organization if it is looking to prevail in the House of Councilors election next summer.
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