RA ZAKARs – is a word one must think twice about before casually throwing it around in Bangladesh today, especially against students, who are tired of the iron grip imposed by now ex-PM Sheikh Hasina, the daughter of Sheikh Mujib, who liberated Bangladesh from Pakistani-rule in the 1970s.

Following the 1971 Liberation War, Bangladesh imposed a quota system for jobs in the public sector. Bangladeshi students felt that this limited their options for employment in government service. Leaving the 44% of so-called merit based seats aside, 10% each belonged to people who were from poorer regions and women, 5% for minorities and a tiny 1% for the disabled, whereas an astounding 30% was reserved for the children and the grandchildren of freedom fighters who fought during the 1971 independence war.

The latter remains the most controversial aspect of the quota debate as the Jatiyo Maktijoddha Council (Jamuka) still struggles to “prepare an accurate and full list of freedom fighters” in the country after almost 50 years of independence, as understood from a 2023 report published in the Prothom Alo. However, “according to the gazette branch of the liberation war affairs ministry, a total of 235,467 people have been designated as being freedom fighter(s)” or their descendants, the Bangla newspaper report adds.

This indeed brings to fore the belief amongst many Bangladeshi people, that the government has designated too large a share of jobs to too small a community of so-called freedom fighters, in a country of almost 170 million people – whether the freedom fighter’s kin deserve this privilege or not remains an equally contentious debate. Ex PM Hasina had herself recognized this when she abolished the quota system and overturned the decision of her father, Sheikh Majubur Rahman, first head of state and honorary “father of the nation” of Bangladesh, who introduced the quota system for government jobs in 1972. But on June 5, 2024, a High Court ruled against Hasina’s decision of 4 October 2018 as “illegal” – to scrap the quota system and demanded the reinstatement of the quota and indeed also the 30% quota for freedom fighter’s families in government jobs. This sparked fury within the country, which would only somewhat subside after the Supreme Court – the highest judicial institution in Bangladesh, announced amendments to reduce the quota to 7% on 21 July.

The “Students Against Discrimination” (SAD), a group leading the student protests, have long advocated for reform of the current status quo in job allocations, albeit they have stopped short of advocating the complete abolition of the quota system altogether. In an interview with the Dhaka Tribune, Sarjis Alam, the national coordinator for SAD said: “Our protest is not against the constitution (of this country). If we look at the distribution of seats in our parliament, we see that of the 350 seats, 50 are reserved, amounting to 14%. If the quota were 56%, there would be 196 reserved seats”. “When our parliament, representing the entire country, has a 14% quota, why should government jobs have a 56% quota?”, he added.

Hence, when the Supreme Court ruling happened and freed up more jobs for merit-based candidacy, the students seemed happy, as gathered from several local news reports. Although as we now know, the attention of the masses had by then moved away from just a reform of the quota system to holding the Hasina administration accountable for the wider brutality of her government and governing style. Before the week starting on 22 July, law enforcement had cracked down violently on protests, international outlets were reporting a gruesome toll of at least a hundred deaths, which according to some estimates has now reached around 300. Hasina inflamed the opposition against her government, when she stated “Why do they (anti-quota protesters) have so much resentment towards the freedom fighters? If the grandchildren of the freedom fighters don’t get quota benefits, should the grandchildren of Razakars get the benefit?”, exclaimed Hasina on July 14 – as reported by The Daily Star, a Bangladeshi-English daily.

Little did she know that this would spark fury and a counter-slogan for the protesting crowds: “Tui ke? Ami ke? Razakar, Razakar!” (Who are you? Who am I? Razakar, Razakar!) The coming weeks would result in pictures of protests circulating the globe, with crowds tearing the capital apart to finally walk into the halls of the Ganabhaban, the official residence of the Prime Minister in Dhaka, forcing Hasina to resign and flee the country.

That afternoon

On Monday, “at around 1.30 PM Hasina’s security team told her that she must leave Ganabhaban”, reads a Facebook post by Shafiqul Alam, the bureau chief of Agence France-Presse in Bangladesh. A front-page story in the Prothom Alo from the next day was quoted by Nazmul Ahasan, a reporter at Bloomberg, in a tweet hinting at Hasina’s insistence to “using brute force” against the approaching mob. At which point the army changed sides remains unclear, but “She reminded the chief that she picked him as the chief over others and he should reciprocate”, wrote Ahasan. General Waker-Uz-Zaman, the army chief, is said to have concurred over talks with his generals that the army should not fire upon civilians, but should instead “enforce a curfew”, Reuters report reveals.

The curfew and internet shutdowns were all part of a plan to suppress the protests brewing since the past weekend. However, the failure to suppress the protests only infuriated Hasina further, as her aides pleaded her to leave. “The unspoken understanding was that the military would not turn against her”, stated Ahasan. “Even her sister, Sheikh Rehana, couldn’t convince her to give up.”

It is understood that the final call before Hasina stepped down was from her US-based son, added the Bloomberg reporter. According to Alam, who spoke to a key aide of Hasina that witnessed her last minutes as the Prime Minister of Bangladesh: “She wanted to record an address to the nation. She wanted to pack up. But the security officers did not give her any time. She and her sister were taken to a motorcade. They came to the Planning Commission building in Agargaon at about 1.45 PM. There she was told that a crowd of people have already gathered nearby. She must not waste her time. Immediately, the security team took her to the Second World War era airport at Old Tejgaon which is now used by army aviation. She and her sister were brought to the airstrip, and they boarded an air force helicopter. (And) they flew out of the country.” Since flying to Delhi, the capital of neighboring India, reports reveal further uncertainty about what’s next for her, as the United Kingdom has refused her asylum, and she is exploring other options such as Finland and Russia.

Sajeeb Wazed Joy, Hasina’s US-based son, appeared on several broadcaster networks following his mother’s escape, confirming he had no future no political aspirations, but also telling of how his mother turned Bangladesh around from being a poor, corrupt and failed state. “After this, we are done! We are tired of saving Bangladesh! Bangladesh can handle its own problems now, it’s not our problem! I see this as the people of Bangladesh being very ungrateful(…)and they deserve the leadership they get (now)”, he stated to Wion – an Indian broadcaster. The following day, the President Mohammed Shahabuddin dissolved the parliament, and engaged in a late evening discussion with anti-quota student movement leaders to discuss the way forward. Others present in the meeting included two Dhaka University professors and three army chiefs, according to The Daily Star. The conclusion of the meeting brought a new actor into the story to possibly add some order to the chaos. Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel laureate and banker-economist, took over the interim government as its “chief advisor” until the next elections take place. As for Sheikh Hasina, she has remained tight lipped since fleeing the country.

Can university students bring down a government?

Well before Hasina’s exit, Historian Iftekhar Iqbal argued in The Diplomat magazine that Gen Z is “moving beyond the ‘traitor’ and ‘freedom fighter’ binary”. The traitor or Pakistani collaborator in the 1971 War of Independence for Bangladesh is called a “Razakar”, and the freedom fighter is the “Muktijoddha”. Like the Muktijoddha(s), the Razakars are believed to have been a small group of people, of some 40,000 men then paid by Pakistan, who were partly responsible for an inhumane genocide of anywhere between 300,000 to 3 million civilians. After independence, the Bangladeshis succeeded in catching most of the Razakars, however only 1000 or so served jail time. Those behind bars were soon granted amnesty in what came to be welcomed by international community, and was seen as a good decision by then PM Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

As for the freedom fighters, they were – as we know – rewarded with a permanent, 30% place in the employment scheme of the public sector. But they were like now only a tiny fraction of the population- no more than 0.27%, according to a paper by a Dhaka university professor. Whatsoever was the logic behind this disproportionate quota system, it is only plain to see that it happened with the justification of the independence war, which was further extended to the children of the freedom fighters in 1997, and then to the grandchildren in 2009. According to Iqbal, “over the years, these quotas have been overwhelmingly filled by Awami League (Hasina’s party) supporters”. “This injustice and marginalization appeared increasingly untenable in recent years, especially as the unemployment rate soared from 2.9 percent in 2009 to a conservative estimate of 5.1 percent in 2023”, added the historian.

Hence, it becomes evidently clear that these quotas were being used for political benefit by Hasina’s party, to appoint corrupt cronies and friends to state jobs- at the same time as she continued the repression of all opposition in the country throughout her 15 years as the head of state. Which is why, “The quota system (for the students) epitomizes systemic, institutional injustice and discrimination, further dividing a nation already strained politically and economically”, wrote Iqbal. In conclusion, he said that: “The binary and divisive labels of ‘Razakar’ and ‘Muktijoddha’ will not deter youths from pursuing an inclusive, fair and just society”.

Who strikes while the iron is hot?

On Monday, the Council on Foreign Relations, an American think-tank stated: “It will now be a struggle to normalize democratic politics (in Bangladesh)”. “Democrats in Bangladesh, supported by regional powers like India and Japan, as well as the United States and Europe, must work to rebuild the country’s once vibrant democracy and civil society. This work should start by ensuring the army keeps to its promise and holds elections soon, rather than clinging to power”, the comment on the in-progress coup added. It seems that, for now, the army is remaining in the background as the Nobel laureate Yunus, 84, takes charge of the country. “I fervently appeal to everybody to stay calm. Please refrain from all kinds of violence”, Yunus told Reuters.

On 7 August, a lower court revoked a corruption case against the banker-economist, which could have led to him serving 6 months behind bars if the charges were upheld. However, he told Reuters that this and the many other corruption cases against him and his Garmeenphone company – one of the largest phone service provider companies in Bangladesh – are all bogus and Hasina’s doing. “His (Yunus) public profile in Bangladesh earned him the hostility of Hasina”, an AFP report states. Another corruption case target from Hasina’s years is her main political opponent, the leader of the opposition BNP, Khaleda Zia – the opposition leader was freed from house-arrest by the President following Hasina’s exit. The two have been the only two Prime Ministers that Bangladesh has seen since 1991 and whose decades-long fierce rivalry came to be known as the “Battle of the Begums” (Queens) in Asian lingo.

Hasina may retain the crown as Bangladesh’s iron lady, but the first woman to ever lead the nation was Zia, with her BNP (Bangladesh Nationalist Party). Khaleda Zia is the widow of Ziaur Rahman, a former President of Bangladesh, who like Hasina’s father was assassinated while in office. Zia took charge of the BNP soon after and went on to prove her leadership skills by standing up to the military dictator Hussain Muhammad Ershad, helping to lead a movement towards democracy through the late-1980s.

After Ershad’s fall in 1990, Zia served as the Bangladeshi PM from 1991 to 1996, after-which Hasina took over before being defeated by Zia to come back in power in 2001 and stay in office until the winter of 2006. After 2009 when Hasina came to power as the PM, Zia and her party were progressively suppressed by the government, to the point where BNP was forced to start boycotting elections. However, the post-Hasina era has indeed opened new possibilities for the BNP, but for the sons of the Begums –
opportunity remains tricky.

Hasina’s son has already cleared the air on his future, or anyone from his family, in Bangladeshi politics through his vocal rants on television since Sheikh Hasina fled the country, where Tarique Rahman, Zia’s son, and his future in the country’s politics remains controversial. Rahman, the acting chairman of the BNP, has been a fugitive since 2011 following his self-imposed exile in London. He was a key suspect in the 2004 Dhaka grenade attack, which had left 24 dead and over 500 people injured – including Hasina. Following the accusation, Rahman was later convicted with 37 others and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2018 – where Hasina’s efforts to extradite him from the UK failed. However, the BNP’s Secretary General Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir in a late evening press briefing on Monday announced the return of Zia’s son. “You all know that our leader, Tarique Rahman, has been unjustly exiled abroad due to false cases. He has fully supported this (student) movement, and we have taken steps to bring him back to the country immediately. Insha’Allah, we will be successful”, stated the BNP leader – as reported by The Business Standard.

Only time will tell if Tarique, who has largely remained out of the public eye – except for his video calls into party meetings, has a future in Bangladeshi politics. However, the BNP via both Rahman and Alamgir have pronounced their desire to have elections as soon as possible. “The interim government must arrange election within three months”, said Alamgir at a BNP rally – adding that the efforts of the anti-quota student movement to overthrow Hasina have brought the BNP great joy and they have the BNP’s complete solidarity and support. The Business Standard report also quoted the 76-year-old former agriculture, civil aviation and tourism minister appealing to his party workers to be enduring in the near future. “We need to utilise this victory and have to be patient”, he urged.

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After 19 years in office as Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Hsien Loong recently announced he would resign in 2024 and hand over the leadership of the PAP and premiership to his deputy, Lawrence Wong: a man widely regarded as representing a new generation of Singaporean leaders. Although this had been widely anticipated for some time, the announcement by Lee of his impending and relatively swift departure did shock many Singaporeans. Wong would only be the fourth prime minister in Singapore’s history and only the second Singaporean leader to not come from the Lee dynasty. In effect, Wong’s accession to the premiership of Singapore and leadership of the PAP marks the end of the Lee dynasty’s long custodianship of Singapore, at least for now.

“Whiter than white”

The reason for Lee’s relatively sudden announcement of his resignation can be seen in the political scandals which have recently rocked the government of Singapore and shaken citizens’ confidence in its leaders. The Singaporean government’s anti-corruption police unit arrested the transport minister S Iswaran on accusations of corruption and graft. On top of this, speaker of parliament Tan Chuan-Jin, also a former PAP member, and a PAP female legislator were forced to resign due to an affair. Chuan-Jin had previously been touted as a future prime minister of Singapore, and the scandal and resulting abrupt end to his political career shocked many Singaporeans.

These scandals may seem relatively mild compared to scandals in Western countries, but the PAP has long prided itself on being “whiter than white” and demanding only the highest moral standards of its ministers and leadership, symbolized by the party’s white uniforms. Even the Straits Times, widely regarded as a pro government mouthpiece, ran an article with the headline “Is the PAP brand in trouble?”. Lee acknowledged that the PAP had “taken a hit” in the eyes of the public due to the scandals. Lee’s resignation and relatively speedy handing over of the reigns to Wong is an attempt to take back control of the narrative, and enshrine a new generation of Singaporean leaders who can renew and refresh support for PAP and continue to lead it to landslide victories.

Early elections?

Enter Lawrence Wong. Lee’s handpicked successor is a man who, unusually for the PAP’s senior leadership, did not attend the prestigious Raffles Institute, grew up in a public housing flat and went to non-elite schools. After joining PAP, he gradually moved up the ranks, serving in the defense, education and national development, and is currently the minister for finance. Wong has outlined a distinct political philosophy to that of Lee. He has called for “compassionate meritocracy”, has criticized free market capitalism for creating excessive economic inequality, and says that he wants to create a Singapore that is “for the many, not the few”. His “Forward Singapore” project, which reported its findings last year, suggested improvements to Singapore’s safety net. In many ways, Wong’s distinctiveness from Lee and the more conservative wing of the PAP may help him appear as a fresh, different face in elections, which are currently scheduled for late 2025 but may be held earlier. One would suspect that after Lee resigns and Wong takes the reigns of power, a snap election may be called to take advantage of Wong’s inevitable honeymoon period.

Singapore has been governed by the PAP with uninterrupted rule for six decades, and core to the PAP’s long period of political domination has been its ability to change with the times and elect leaders and adopt principles that appeal to the majority of Singaporeans. It remains to be seen if Wong can continue this long period of success, or if the long term trend of the PAP gradually losing popular support will continue.

The post All Change in Singapore in 2024 appeared first on Asia Elects.

If you’ve been following Japanese politics or polling at all, you will know that Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and his cabinet are not exactly being seen as national saviours. Received wisdom has it that cabinet approval of under 30% spells curtains for a PM; at the time of writing, Kishida is sitting on an average of 21% and hasn’t left the danger zone in months. Bear in mind that the last person this happened to was Tarō Asō in 2008, who went on to obtain that rarest of achievements, losing an election as the Liberal Democratic Party.

But why? Kishida is almost centrist by LDP standards, and for a long time was defined by his non-confrontational, ‘boring’ political style, but the Japanese government is now less popular than at the height of the Unification Church scandal, the darkest days of the pandemic, or the fallout (no pun intended) from Fukushima. To make things more confusing, the rest of the polling data is all over the place. Pollsters were recently unable to decide whether the main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party was neck-and-neck with the LDP or a full 19 points behind in party support. It’s very odd, and nobody knows what will happen, but there are one or two signs of what might be happening. Here is what your correspondent has to say about all this.

First of all, it’s not the scandal

Japanese headlines have recently been dominated by the uragane jiken or “slush fund scandal”. This started as an exposé of the widespread LDP practice of funnelling donations to politicians via their factions, and has since evolved into a wider investigation into – for example – what exactly it is LDP representatives do with the billions of yen they sometimes receive for “policy activities”. This caused the LDP’s faction system, almost the basis of national politics for decades, to collapse in name, although we don’t know if it will yet survive behind the scenes. Any stories about Kishida’s popularity, then, are likely going to talk about slush funds. The numbers, however, imply that that’s a mistake.

Consider this graph from Mitsuki Miharu, showing cabinet approval from 2013 up until the start of this year. Various notable political events have been added for clarity. Notice how recent cabinet approval is about 10 points lower than its previous low points in this time frame? Those low points correspond to scandals that, unlike the slush funds, were literally deadly. Civil servant Toshio Akagi took his own life after being made to fabricate documents for then-PM Shinzō Abe’s personal benefit in 2017-18’s Moritomo Gakuen affair. Meanwhile, the Unification Church, the home-wrecking Korean cult whose ties to the LDP were revealed in mid-2022, was likely responsible for many lives lost to suicide and domestic violence, including two in the family of Abe’s infamous killer. Should we interpret from this that slush funds resonate more with the electorate than death?

That seems unlikely; for one, today’s low government approval has nothing to do with slush funds. One can observe that most of Kishida’s popularity drop happened before that scandal broke in December. In other words, something else must have happened to the PM. The most notable negative news story about the government during the sharp drop was a long, drawn-out series of technical errors around the MyNumber national identification system, the use of which the government plans to make compulsory in order to use the health insurance system. The trouble with that explanation, however, is that, similarly to comparing slush funds and death, it implies the government’s popularity plummeted twice as far as with your average scandal because of some tech problems and small-scale data breaches, which seems far-fetched. Something else is going on, but luckily, there is one last source of concrete data at our disposal.

The kids aren’t all right (or left)

Japanese pollsters don’t usually go into much detail, and finding crosstabs can be frustrating. The Yomiuri, however, released an age-based breakdown of cabinet support back in November, which is more informative than it might first appear. We can see that the older age groups’ support for Kishida follows a pattern recognisable to Japan-watchers: starting off strong in the honeymoon phase, then plummeting when the first scandal (the Unification Church and Abe’s historically unprecedented state funeral) broke, rising again in early 2023 when foreign policy hit the headlines, and then falling once more as the MyNumber issue (more salient among older voters as it involves both technology and healthcare) hit the headlines.

Younger voters, however, followed their own pattern. Cabinet approval amongst the youth started out above average, perhaps a lingering effect of how popular the Abe cabinet was with them, but bagan to decline shortly after the 2021 election. It then slowly declined, reaching the mid-thirties round about when other age groups’ approval did, perhaps because younger voters were much more likely to support Abe’s state funeral. Young people reacted far less to the foreign policy spike than their elders did (note that these two effects together imply that Abe’s staunchest personal supporters were young while the biggest fans of his hawkish foreign policy are old; more on that later), and even the slight increase may have been to do with early 2023 marking the end of mask mandates in Japan. Another crash round about the same time as the MyNumber headlines, finally, brought youth approval right down below the 30 percent mark.

Japan’s electorate, then, may have split in two, with only one of those halves, mostly (but not entirely) older voters, acting according to received political wisdom, while the other, younger, half follows some new logic, less sensitive to scandal and social issues but more sensitive to… what? Something must have happened starting from early 2022 to set cabinet approval on its downward slope. The task, then, is to find out what that something else might have been. For that, imagine a newspaper in 2023. Yes, page one would have been Moonies and MyNumber.

And page two?

The clue is in the (nick)name

Japan in 2023 was not the happiest of places. There was good news early on, as the last of the pandemic restrictions were finally lifted, but the dream soon evaporated into everyday life that was a special kind of dreary for some. 2022’s global inflation did not spare Japan, and to make things worse, the yen crashed, realising a 2012 ‘Abenomics’ promise just as import prices were becoming more relevant to everyday consumers than exports. Meanwhile, Japan’s infamous demographic time-bomb kept on ticking loudly in full view of everyone.

Old-school LDP Kishida responded to this with old-school LDP inertia. His campaign rhetoric of “new capitalism” faded away after compromises with the rest of his party, and the traditional ‘spring offensive’ of established unions in Japan designed to secure wage increases failed to match inflation, especially for the majority of workers without a traditional company union. As for longer-term angst, while the government announced a huge stimulus package for childcare support, it kept light on the detail at first in the usual Japanese way; in the meantime, cries of ‘how are you going to pay for it?’ hit the rafters. Again, perhaps driven by intraparty compromise, Kishida utterly failed to deny rumours of funding it through tax hikes on working-age people, which were seen as cancelling out the actual benefits of the stimulus. The general gloom thus continued unabated, and in time, these rumours gave Kishida his enduring nickname of zōzei megane, translated by the Japan Times as “the four-eyed tax hiker”. He has since been called zōzei megane to his face in the Diet on multiple occasions, and to cap the year off, the “[written] character of the year”, voted on by the public to reflect the national mood, was… zei, “tax”. Even the slush-fund scandal seems to be in the process of getting re-spun as a story of large-scale tax avoidance by politicians through legal loopholes.

It’s tax fever, then, and without any actual tax hikes at all – well, unless you count the invidious “invoice system”, a 10% tax increase and bureaucratic burden for small businesses and freelancers disguised as an innocent accounting rule change. The mood did not even change when Kishida announced a temporary tax cut, as voters rejected his suggestion that it was an inflation measure and accused him of throwing them a blatant pre-election bung.

Could a tax regime that mostly doesn’t exist yet, though, really be the reason why Kishida is floundering? How come the “bung” didn’t work? It may be because something deeper is going on, something of which the tax talk is as much of a symptom as a cause.

A matter of boring doom

Consider this. You’re a young-ish worker in Tokyo, increasingly insecure about the “ish” bit. Your power bill has gone up, your food bill has gone up, your wages have stayed precisely the same, and your favourite sushi chain has just taken things off the menu because it’s become “difficult” to source at the price. The headlines talk of national collapse if people don’t start having more children, but you’ve been single for almost a decade now, and how do they expect you to date on your working hours anyway?

You look up for a second, wondering who else is in the old coffee shop you’ve found yourself in this afternoon, but it’s just the TV; specifically, it’s Kishida’s bespectacled face, saying something deliberately complex and politicalese. Damn, you think, this is when he’s going to announce that tax hike, isn’t it?

This is life in modern Japan: increasingly grim news about demographics and the economy, combined with increasingly grim reality for everyday Japanese people. It’s a slow-burn sort of grim. It’s not a case of mega-tsunami, Lehman Shocks, demagogues, culture wars, Brexits. It is simply what was predicted in the nineties coming true and being responded to with sad shrugs of the shoulder, and like Kishida’s rumoured tax hikes, it’s felt more keenly amongst people a long way off retirement – if that concept will even exist in decades to come. Welcome to the world of boring doom.

There are two key things to point out about boring doom; firstly, it is not comprised of overtly political emotions. There are no Donald Trumps building walls, or Angela Merkels happily welcoming millions of refugees. Instead, both left and right recognise boring doom’s constituent social problems, and the depressed, depoliticised majority frustrates both. Second, it is not usually seen as something that can be overcome, especially by politics. Granted, some of this is justified, as effecting change in Japan is not easy. The education system does not encourage young Japanese people to speak out, whether on personal issues or social, and the country’s systems are also notoriously ‘cold’ and demoralising (just ask Japanese #MeToo icon Shiori Itō). In politics, bureaucrats routinely stonewall attempts at reform and pressure politicians into not blaming their woes on them, and the media landscape isn’t helpful either. Thus, when they do win, opposition politicians, inexperienced at dealing with organisations and pressure, can find themselves disappointing voters. They, in turn, can often wonder what they went through all the trouble for, dutifully bring back the LDP, and think shikata ga nai – nothing can be done. Rinse, repeat, and the doom becomes one notch more boring.

Bats on a birdless island

The boring doom hypothesis fails, on its own, to explain why it’s coming into play now, rather than with every cabinet since the nineties. One could argue that the taxes have made it obvious, as unlike global economic cycles or population ageing, taxes are directly created by politicians, so it’s harder to ignore politics’s contribution to the doom. Another might point out that the doom has simply become increasingly boring as the Lost Decades multiply, but that doesn’t explain why Abe lasted so long. There is, however, another possible explanation, and that is that Japanese politics really has been like this for ages, and that it’s Abe, not Kishida, who is the outlier.

A sense of apolitical doom logically means the government can become very unpopular, as the only real way to defend doom in the absence of a real or imagined external enemy is by feeding people’s powerlessness and claiming that anything other than voting for doom is naïve idealism. This is the LDP strategy, boosted by their vested-interest voter base benefiting from low turnout and engagement, but it’s so unlikely in some ways that it takes a very skilled performer of political theatre to pull off. The flipside of this is that, because there are fewer hot-button policies for people to consistently oppose the government on, approval can have a fairly high ceiling, and so when someone does have a good PR game, it can really pay off.

This is what happened with Abe. His policy achievements are actually few and far between, and every time he passed a right-wing one, his support rate dipped until the political theatre kicked in once more. However, the political theatre had an outsized effect on younger voters, who tend to be even less politically engaged than average (and thus less likely to be strongly left-wing, hence high support ceiling). They had also just experienced the very unpopular and chaotic 2009-12 opposition regime, which fell foul of those obstacles to change from earlier and made the idea of a non-LDP government look singularly unappealing. Thus, Abe was able to present himself as a “strong and stable” economic reformist. The only other 21^st-century Japanese PM to successfully fend off boring doom was Jun’ichirō Koizumi (2001-5), who had a similarly strong media strategy and was also noted for genuinely passing several major reforms (for better or for worse, but the point stands; one could hardly call him a peddler of stagnation). In short, the Kishida cabinet isn’t much of an outlier, and only looks like one because the true outliers tend to stay in office for longer.

The samurai warlord Oda Nobunaga, upon hearing that a rival had unified the island of Shikoku, famously called him “a bat on a birdless island” (torinakishima no kōmori), implying that he had only risen above the competition because of how singularly unimpressive that competition was. Given how the LDP has worked until now, most leaders chosen to appease factional interests rather than on electability grounds, it is not surprising that most LDP leaders have been political bats on birdless islands, consistently struggling with popularity. The LDP, being in such a strong position of power, has no real incentive to reform, and so the Diet Building’s ziggurat may well host a healthy bat population for years to come.

This still leaves the question, though, of why these bats keep winning elections.

Demon slayers: how to fight boring doom and win

Both boring doom itself and the variable bat-ness of LDP leaders affect the opposition as much as the government. The trillion-yen question of Japanese politics, reflected through a Kishida-era lens, is still an open one; why, when LDP approval is at an all-time low, hasn’t anyone been able to capitalise?

Senkyo Dot Com recently asked voters what they thought was holding the opposition back, and it’s hard to get an answer from the results. No single answer dominated in either the telephone (JX) or internet (Gunosy) polls, and the plurality choice, “lack of competence as MPs”, is both vague and uses the sort of wording the LDP likes to use to stir up apathy. The other answers are almost as vague.

The party support rates offer more clues. Kenta Izumi, CDP leader of the opposition, recently held a bilingual press conference for foreign correspondents, and spent much of the time discussing very broad-stroke economic policies that most would agree with, at least in slogan form, such as pushing for a greater focus on ‘new’ industries over ‘old’. The trouble is, an LDP leadership candidate wishing to appear reformist, such as Tarō Kōno or Koizumi’s son Shinjirō, would probably say pretty much the same things. That style of politics, from government and opposition, has clearly not managed to dispel boring doom so far, so voters have no confidence that it will magically do so this time. This is reflected in the polls, as the CDP have not gained as much ground as one might expect from their diligent scandal-chasing. The Japan Communist Party faces persistent image issues, and smaller left-of-centre opposition parties have also struggled with convincing voters of their relevance, an issue that has proven tough to overcome even in countries without boring doom.

The two formulae that have worked for the opposition so far have been rewriting the rules of the LDP’s enforced ‘realism’ and ignoring it entirely. Izumi Fusaho has gone for the first approach. The former mayor of a medium-sized city, he shot to fame for taking on the bureaucrats to deliver popular, family-friendly urban policies which had a measurable effect on demographics. Despite allegations of bullying, many would like to see him run for national office – it’s hard to say a policy change can’t be made when you have already made it happen once.

The other strategy, one could call it anti-politics, is exemplified by Reiwa Shinsengumi, a left-wing populist party founded by a former actor and which has been campaigning against boring doom since it was founded in the Abe days. They have, for example, a habit of parliamentary stunts, such as one member physically diving to block an anti-refugee bill and another holding up a placard in the chamber that read “the government and [mainstream] opposition are both a farce!”. Their policies follow a similar bent: sales tax is their public enemy number one, they seek to deficit spend even more than the LDP do, and their other policies take aim at jikosekinin, the post-bubble idea of ‘every man for themselves’ that some blame for exhausting the population. In Reiwa’s book, LDP ‘realism’, and ‘the old order of doing things’ are there to be smashed with a big pink hammer. It’s still a small party with small party problems, and its angry, cavalier image is a turn-off to many older and more conservative voters. However, it is the only left-of-centre party currently on the rise, especially amongst the younger section of the electorate experiencing boring doom more keenly.

Combine these two strategies together and you get Nippon Ishin no Kai, which promotes right-wing economic reforms, similarly to Koizumi. Founded in Osaka, they have gained increasingly strong control of its government, and have been able to push past bureaucrats and convince the local media to join their side in order to achieve change in their home city. Their campaigns point to their record of achieving local change, and are also anti-political, for example supporting salary cuts for politicians. Some would call Ishin populist, and some would not; perhaps they are in a sort of Goldilocks zone, being angry enough to cut through the doom while also staid enough to not worry conservative voters. In recent months, mishandling of the Osaka Expo and various personal scandals have brought Ishin down, but that is more of an indictment of Ishin themselves (and their LDP-splinter origins) than their strategy, and besides, their approval is not unusually low even now and they could still be in for a good election.

The batty doom-mongers look to 2024

This, seemingly, is how Japanese politics has got to where it is now; faced with decades looking increasingly lost, a large and mostly young chunk of the electorate has become extremely disenchanted with politics and with the LDP especially, giving short shrift to all but the most adept of politicians – especially when they’re threatening to raise taxes. At the same time, the traditional political dynamics aren’t being kind to Kishida either, and so the rest of the electorate are just as turned off by him. Combine the two together, and you get a singularly unpopular government.

What about what happens from here on in, though? At least so far, the polling response to the slush-fund scandal has been pretty muted, with only a few extra percentage points’ drop in Kishida’s popularity. However, that is to be expected; while the boring doom electorate may be continuing to drift away, the traditional one was already in ‘scandal mode’ from MyNumber and the lingering effects of the Unification Church shock. So, there wasn’t much more ground that Kishida could lose with yet another scandal. Perhaps the remaining 20% of poll respondents (who skew old; Japan doesn’t weight its polls) are the LDP’s organisational voters.

However, it is very hard to predict the next stage with this logic. We don’t know if the boring doom electorate, mostly young, will actually turn out, for example. We also don’t know what the structural responses to the slush-fund scandal will be; if LDP factions are dissolved, will that make it harder for individual MPs to keep their voter bases going, thus shrinking the organisational vote and destroying the LDP’s inbuilt advantage at election time? Or will we see the reverse happening: the factional way of choosing LDP leaders decline, electability become more favoured, Koizumis and Abes appear more often at the top of politics, and the LDP ultimately benefit by becoming a ‘normal’ party? Alternatively, will the current way of doing politics become more entrenched simply by dint of the doom getting more boring with each passing year?

One thing’s for sure: with an election potentially on the horizon and Kishida showing no signs of a rebound, the one thing that’s not boring is the situation we find ourselves in right now.

The post <strong>The Spectre of Doomerism: How a ‘Boring’ Prime Minister Became This Hated</strong> appeared first on Asia Elects.

What is a governorate?

After an entire decade, Iraq is preparing to conduct a new set of elections on the 18th of December to determine the members of the nation’s governorate councils among 15 of the 19 governorates – excluding those under the jurisdiction of the Kurdistan Regional Government in the north of the country.

Governorate councils are an important factor in the day-to-day administration of the country, providing a way for citizens of each governorate to push for local changes instead of going through the sometimes slow and inefficient Parliament.

Governorate councils are seen as useless by many Iraqis today, but they are granted constitutional powers that allow them greater autonomy in Iraq’s semi-devolved provincial system. For example, Diyala’s council voted with a Sunni-Kurdish majority to declare the governorate semi-autonomous in a move to break away from Baghdad during the unrest of the Arab spring in 2011.

Governorate elections also serve as an indicator of a party’s or factions popularity ahead of the next Parliamentary elections, as well as each faction’s position, alliances and rivals in interests.

According to electoral law, each governorate is treated as one unified constituency, with 12 seats in its council as a standard, and one additional seat granted for each 200,000 residents above 1,000,000. Iraq’s Parliament voted in favour of a new election law earlier this year, setting proportional voting using the Sainte-Laguë method (with a divisor of 1.7) as the new electoral system for these elections.

As the confusing political alliances of Iraq have shifted since the October 2021 elections, and that alliances within each governorate naturally differ from national parliamentary coalitions, Asia Elects’ previous articles on the political alliances of Iraq may not apply to these elections. This article will provide a brief introduction to the major coalitions and alliances competing in these elections.

The Shia House

Despite uniting to oppose Sadr’s violent takeover attempt in the previous year, and forming a government under a unified “Coordinative Frame”, the opposing and contradictory Shia parties have naturally gone their own ways in these elections, each trying to gain more power than the others to tip the balance in their favour. However, all of the Shia parties nominally support the government of Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ Al Sudani as part of the Coordinative Frame.

Some of the most prominent Shia parties and alliances in these elections are:

State of Law Coalition

Long-time supporters of former Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki, this coalition has been active in Iraqi politics since 2009. Formed with the Da’wa Islamic Party as its main component, the State of Law coalition gave birth to many new factions and parties that split off to oppose it, such as the Victory Party of former Prime Minister Haider Al Abadi. The alliance aims to reinstate the influence Nouri Al Maliki had on local bureaucracy and governments during his long tenure (2006-2014). The alliance officially espouses Islamism as its official doctrine.

Nabny (We Build) Alliance

Supporters of the Popular Mobilization Forces and its associated paramilitaries, Nabny is led by the commander of the Iran-backed Badr brigades. The alliance includes multiple other paramilitary forces with loyalties to Iran such as the Asa’ib Ahl Al Haqq (Bands of the Righteous). It is considered the provincial version of the Parliamentary Fatah (Conquest) Alliance that represented these factions during the October 2021 elections.

Patriotic State Forces Alliance

An alliance between the Victory Party of former Prime Minister Haider Al Abadi and The Wisdom Movement of Shia Cleric Ammar Al Hakim, two figures considered Islamist moderates as opposed to the more radical Shia parties. This alliance also participated in the 2021 October elections, where it gained only 4 seats. It lacks a large base of loyal supporters like other coalitions.

Al Asas (Foundation) Alliance

Led by the first deputy of the Speaker of Parliament, Muhsin Al Mandalawi, the alliance presents itself as a civilian coalition of secular politicians, including some rising figures in Iraqi politics like member of Parliament Mustafa Sanad and other independents. However, the alliance has been linked to Iraqi Hezbollah commander Abu Fadak and accused of supporting Iranian influence. It has not helped the alliance’s civilian image that members of the alliance like Mustafa Sanad publicly disavowed secular governance in TV interviews. This alliance is relatively new, with no real base of support formed as of yet.

The Sunni House

The unified “Sovereignty Alliance” that once led the Sunni component of Iraq in the aftermath of the Sadrist coup d’etat has fractured into multiple pieces. Its two main components, Halbousi’s Progress Party and Khanjar’s Azm, have themselves been broken up into smaller factions, threatening the political prospects of a Sunni project in Iraq.

The most prominent Sunni political alliances are:

Taqadum (Progress) Party

Led by former speaker of parliament Mohammed Al Halbousi, the party was successful in getting most of the votes and seats of the Sunni population in the 2021 elections, beating their Sunni rivals Azm and electing Halbousi as Speaker of Parliament. The party has seen recent defeats, where Halbousi has been impeached as speaker by the Federal Supreme Court of Iraq for charges of forgery, levied against him by a Taqadum MP for forcing him to resign earlier in 2022. The party’s main base of support is from the Sunnis of Al Anbar governorate, and hopes that the governorate elections will provide much needed reassurance of its position as the main Sunni force in the country.

Azm (Determination) Alliance

Previously led by Halbousi’s main rival, Khamis Al Khanjar, since his ousting the party has since been overtaken by his former confidant, Muthanna Al Samara’i. The party still view themselves as rivals to Taqadum, and they hope to overtake them as the main Sunni power with their bases of support in Saladin and Diyala governorates.

Siyada (Sovereignty) Alliance

Al Khanjar’s new coalition, with the same name as the defunct Pan-Sunni alliance between Khanjar’s Azm and Taqadum. Khamis Al Khanjar is trying to get back onto the Sunni political stage through the governorate elections. The Alliance hopes to win back support of Sunnis in Diyala and Saladin governorates from Azm.

Al Hasm (Decisiveness) Alliance

Formed earlier this year by old guard Sunni establishment politicians that have lost a lot of power to the newcomers of Taqadum, Al Hasm includes political elites with an abundance of funds and influence such as Jamal Al Karbouli along with former speaker of parliament Osama Al Nujaifi. The party hopes to reestablish the influence of the Sunni old guard, with its base of support lying in the city of Mosul, from where Nujaifi hails.

The Kurdish House

The four governorates under the jurisdiction of the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government, Erbil, Suleymaniah, Dohuk and Halabja, will not participate in the governorate elections in December, as the Federal Supreme Court disbanded their governorate councils recently. Instead, the Kurds will hold their elections in February of 2024. However, Kurdish parties like the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party will continue to campaign for support in non-KRG governorates with Kurdish minorities (such as Diyala, Wasit, Kerkuk and Nineveh). They are unlikely to be a serious force anywhere else in these elections.

Qiyam

ndependent and Secular parties rejecting sectarian divides have been present in Iraqi politics since anyone can remember, but they have gained prominence after the October 2019 protests. Many new movements formed out of these protests, and some of them gained entry into parliament in 2021. However, most of these parties still remain unknown, with the exception of the Qiyam (Principles) Alliance, the second largest by sheer number of candidates.

Qiyam is led by the Iraqi Communist Party, and includes many secular and non-sectarian movements such as the Kurdistan Communist Party, the Democratic Current, Nazl Akhith Haqqi (Coming to Take my Right) Movement and many more. Qiyam has presented more than 400 candidates throughout the nation, bypassing sectarian and ethnic divides. The alliance has repeatdly stated that it will push for political reform and change through electoralism, support for the democratic process, and an end to paramilitary violence. It has also promised to bring justice to the families of the martyrs of the 2019 protests, refusing to collude or ally with any parties from the former Coordinative Frame.

Sadr

Muqtada Al Sadr, leader of the Sadrist Movement, has decided to boycott all political activity ever since his failed coup d’etat in the previous year, including the governorate elections. This boycott has resulted in his supporters refusing to participate in the elections at all, burning their election IDs and taking down any posters advertising election participation or any of the candidates in Sadrist strongholds, such as Sadr city and parts of Najaf where Sadr lives.

Sadr serves as a wildcard, festering anxiety in the Iraqi Shia establishment and the Coordinative Frame as they fear him mobilising his supporters in demonstrations to disrupt the electoral process, or even potentially attempt another violent takeover on the eve of the elections. As a result, the military has been mobilised to set up checkpoints and security measures on the day of the election, as well as the days before and after it, to ensure a smooth electoral process.

The post Iraq’s Governorate Elections: Who’s Who appeared first on Asia Elects.

Following on from the first half of the local elections, this Sunday will mark polling day in another vast swathe of the country. As explained previously, while the previous half was all about the more powerful types of local authority (prefectures and designated cities), this time it’s the turn of the much more numerous normal-sized type – regular cities, towns, villages, and Tokyo’s wards.

However, the headlines are likely to be taken up by the five parliamentary by-elections happening on the same date. Many of these by-elections have been delayed for over a year due to Japan’s neverending legal battles over vote disparity (AKA mutually-agreed gerrymandering – just look at the Lower House voter numbers further down), and the fact that there are five at once, four of them competitive, has led some to comment that this is something of a midterm election for Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and his conservative LDP.

The Macro, Updated

What has happened between the last tranche of elections and this one? Well, for a start, the PM narrowly avoided getting hit by a faulty pipe bomb in Wakayama. This has raised the spectre of Shinzo Abe’s death last year, as if it hadn’t already been raised by the by-election in his old seat, although it is unclear how related the two incidents actually are. Although it appears possible (but again, not proven) that the defendant in the case may have been motivated by some sort of distrust of Japan’s genuinely skewed election system, the very forces he once professed to hate – chief among them the LDP – may well be the chief beneficiaries of this, just as there is some evidence that Abe’s death ‘saved’ the LDP from a worse result in the Upper House election.

Other than that, the trends have been fairly similar to last time. Kishida’s cabinet approval rating stood at 39.7% on the 20^th of April, while disapproval stood at 43.3%. This compares to approval in a statistical tie with disapproval around the 41% mark just before the last comparable set of by-elections, in 2021, which the LDP lost 3-0 despite including one contest in the usually safely conservative Hiroshima. Party approval, meanwhile, sees the LDP standing at 34% party support, compared to 37% last time around and the centre-left CDP at 6.4% compared to about 7.5%. The biggest change is the Osaka-based libertarian Ishin party, which since its surge in the first half of these elections has reached 7.2%, ahead of the CDP, compared to just 2.8% two years ago. These are consistently worse numbers for the prime minister and LDP, but it is not entirely clear how much the numbers are actually true given the lack of poll weighting, and how much they would affect local and by-election voting behaviour even if they were – one need only look at the first half of these locals and the LDP’s lack of decline to see that.

The Elections

There are, quite simply, far too many small town elections to cover properly, so apologies to anyone particularly concerned about any one in particular who can’t speak Japanese – reply to an Asia Elects tweet and I might try and find a way around it. The by-elections, however, are worth covering in a bit more individual detail.

Lower House, Chiba 5^th (452,920 voters)

• Arfiya Eri (LDP, backed by Komei [Centre-right])
• Junko Okano (DPP, Centre-right)
• Mitsue Oda (N-Koku, *)
• Kentarō Yazaki (CDP)
• Tomoyasu Kishino (Ishin)
• Kazuko Saito (JCP, Left)
• Kentarō Hoshi (Ind)

The Chiba 5^th district (or rather, former 5^th district – new boundaries will be in place for the next election), a chunk of inner Tokyo suburb perhaps best known as the home of Tokyo Disneyland, has been LDP for the last four election cycles, but its incumbent MP Kentarō Sonoura (this place really does like the name Kentarō) was forced to resign after it was revealed that he may have tried to conceal 40 million yen worth of political funds. Perhaps because of the apparent safety of the seat, the opposition parties have utterly failed to coalesce behind one candidate, and the LDP themselves have also taken a risk by fielding half-Uyghur-half-Uzbek naturalised citizen Arfiya Eri as their candidate. Eri is not popular; her posters talk ‘diversity’, but many in her own party would rather see a more ‘typical’ candidate, while opposition voters may wonder what on earth a child of immigrants is doing standing for the LDP just as the party tries to make it easier to deport asylum seekers.

Perhaps more importantly, however, there is a clear pattern of post-scandal by-elections turning against the LDP. The contest in Hokkaido 2^nd district in 2021, won easily by a CDP candidate running with unified opposition backing, is as good an example of this as any. Thus, Eri seemingly started this race behind the CDP’s Yazaki, whom most voters seem to have agreed is the opposition candidate worth watching here. However, she has apparently since caught up and is now running pretty much neck and neck with Yazaki.

Lower House, Wakayama 1^st (305,106 voters)

• Hirofumi Kado (LDP, backed by Komei)
• Yumi Hayashi (Ishin)
• Hideaki Kunishige (JCP, backed by SDP [Centre-left])
• Takahira Yamamoto (N-Koku)

This is the race which Kishida was supporting his party in when the pipe bomb incident occurred, but ironically enough, it appears to be one of the few where no sympathy vote will come through for the PM. This by-election is being held to replace Shuhei Kishimoto, the DPP member for this district who resigned for a successful run for governor of Wakayama. Although an LDP-JCP-Ishin race would usually see most opposition supporters back the JCP, this is Kansai, and the undisputed best-placed candidate to topple the LDP is Ishin’s Yumi Hayashi, who ironically enough was herself elected to Wakayama City’s council via another by-election last year. If Ishin win, it will become their second FPTP Lower House seat outside of the prefecture of Osaka.

Asia Elects fans may also be interested to hear that this election marks another turning point in the long-running LDP feud between Toshihiro Nikai and Hiroshige Seko (the article on which is currently bogged down with copyright formatting, apologies). It appears as if the two have come to a compromise, as Nikai has avoided Seko parachuting himself into the Lower House while Seko prevented Nikai’s close ally Yōsuke Tsuruho from doing the same himself, but the result is a fairly weak candidate in Hirofumi Kado who is still Nikai faction, so Nikai seems to have won this battle. What will change if the unthinkable happens and Wakayama voters rebel against both at once (even Kishimoto is backing his former rival Kado) remains to be seen.

Lower House, Yamaguchi 2^nd (284,320 voters)

• Hideo Hiraoka (Ind, backed by CDP and JCP)
• Nobuchiyo Kishi (LDP, backed by Komei)

Yamaguchi, LDP stronghold and home to the Abe-Kishi political dynasty, hosts two by-elections at once that stand a chance of ending its Diet representation in one fell swoop. The 2^nd district, in the east of the prefecture around the city of Iwakuni, is notable as the only one in the prefecture to have fallen to the centre-left DPJ landslide in 2009, but the LDP, specifically Abe’s younger brother Nobuo Kishi, took it back three years later. Kishi served as defence minister under Kishida before resigning over the Unification Church scandal that followed his brother’s death, and later resigned as MP over “health issues”. As with Abe himself, it is clear that Kishi had genuine health issues, perhaps exacerbated by the sudden passing of a dear relative, but some may question the timing.

The LDP have fielded Kishi’s son Nobuchiyo, who has been a political secretary to Kishi for some time and appears inexperienced in the ways of elected politics. The opposition has latched onto this as a case of everything wrong with Japanese dynastic politics, and has secured a strong candidate in the form of the area’s former MP Hideo Hiraoka. Therefore, unusually for Yamaguchi, this is a competitive by-election. However, all polls have shown either a marginal or a slightly less marginal lead for Kishi junior and the gap seems to be slightly widening.

Lower House, Yamaguchi 4^th (245,493 voters)

• Hideyuki Takemoto (Ind)
• Yoriko Ōno (Ind)
• Yoshifu Arita (CDP, backed by JCP)
• Shinji Yoshida (LDP, backed by Komei)
• Ai Watanabe (N-Koku)

The Yamaguchi 4^th district, centred on the prefecture’s largest city and national puffer-fish capital Shimonoseki, was the long-time fiefdom of Shinzo Abe. In some countries, such as the UK, the tradition is for major parties to not contest by-elections held due to a murder, but this does not appear to be the case in Japan; instead, the opposition have gone full steam ahead with the Abe angle, fielding former MP Yoshifu Arita. Arita is mainly known as a journalist, specifically focusing on, yes, cults. Unfortunately for him, however, this is still very safe LDP territory, and every poll is showing a safe win for former Shimonoseki city councillor Shinji Yoshida. He may have huge boots to fill, but he won’t have to for long; the seat is slated to disappear at the next election.

Upper House, Oita (945,934 voters)

• Aki Shirasaka (LDP, backed by Komei)
• Tadatomo Yoshida (CDP, backed by JCP and SDP [Centre-left])

Oita, with its industrial base, is by far and away the swingiest prefecture in conservative Kyushu, and has long been one of the last redoubts of the SDP, the small centre-left party that is the direct successor of the old Japan Socialist Party. Kiyoshi Adachi, who won this seat in the 2019 Upper House election’s biggest upset, resigned to unsuccessfully run for governor, but the opposition has managed to find an equally big name to replace him: Tadatomo Yoshida, Lower House MP and former SDP leader. Yoshida was one of many prominent names from that party to leave and join the CDP in 2020. The polls are looking fairly good for him, and only two out of ten have shown him behind. The LDP are very much not out of this, but if they win Oita, expect headlines referencing a triumph in all five by-elections before long.

The post <strong>What to Expect from the Second Half of Japan’s Unified Local Elections</strong> appeared first on Asia Elects.

Things are fairly quiet on Japan’s national political front, in keeping with the old-school consensus (some would say indecisive) politics of Prime Minister Kishida. Despite recent rumours of a snap election, the next Lower House vote might not happen for another two years, and the same can confidently be said for the Upper. On a local level, for the last week, tell-tale square posters have gone up around most of the country and loudspeaker vans have been busy waking everyone up at 8 a.m. sharp.

2023, like other years of the Rabbit (and Sheep and Boar) plays host to a quadrennial cycle of elections known as the tōitsu chihōsen or “unified local elections”. This is something of a misnomer, as due to various historical quirks of timing there is a local election happening somewhere in Japan on pretty much any Sunday one cares to mention. However, a large proportion of them are clustered this month. Perhaps most notably, a full 41 of 47 prefectures (first-level administrative divisions; states, provinces, etc.) will decide the makeup of their assemblies for the next four years.

The elections are divided into two halves. The first half, which will be covered in this article as the polling day is the 9th of April, consists of elections for nine prefectural governors, the aforementioned 41 assemblies, six mayors of “designated cities” (20 cities deemed, usually because of how large they are, by the government to be worthy of powers usually granted to prefectures), and 13 of said designated cities’ councils. The second half, scheduled for the 23rd of April, will see about a third of Japan’s regular city, town, and village councils elected, along with about an eighth of their mayors. The day also sees Tokyo elect most of its ward councils and five national by-elections take place, four in the Lower House and one in the Upper, after a long delay caused by a lawsuit concerning constituency sizes.

This means that most of the elections deemed large enough to fall within Asia Elects’s remit will occur in the first half. Rather than posting 69 separate twitter threads on the day, the elections will be briefly introduced here. Updates will be posted on polling night when NHK projects the winner of a gubernatorial or mayoral election, and when a prefectural assembly or city council has filled all of its seats.

The Macro

First, what is the political world – the national political world – going to be looking out for? The big number, the one that may well be splashed over the front pages on Monday, concerns the total seat count. If you add together every prefectural assembly seat across the nation, will Kishida’s ruling LDP still win over half of them, as they did last time? Will we see an Ishin surge as in the national elections in 2021 and 2022? Will the CDP and/or JCP get their mojo back? What about unlikely victories by parties that didn’t exist at the time of the last unified locals, like the left populist Reiwa Shinsengumi, the crypto-Bannonite Sanseito, or the ever-changing N-Koku?

Kishida’s current average approval in polling, as measured by electoral analyst Miharu Mitsuki, is about 37.5%, compared to about 46.5% disapproval. This compares to about 47.5%-34.0% in favour of Shinzo Abe’s cabinet on the eve of the 2019 unified locals. Cabinet approval is on a clear upward trajectory, so there is upside for Kishida, but the same was true of Abe’s already positive approval in 2019. Party approval is also less positive for the LDP this time around, by around three points, and the main opposition CDP is performing marginally better than in 2019 and unlike then is not in the midst of a months-long poll decline.

There are also reasons to believe that the recent uptick in Kishida’s approval might not benefit the LDP as much as they might hope. It has not been accompanied by a spike in LDP support, and has been linked to the PM’s personal actions in recent weeks, such as visiting Ukraine and striking a diplomatic deal with South Korea. Meanwhile, many of the issues that have dogged Kishida’s premiership, most notably the Unification Church scandal, are more to do with his party than the man himself – exactly what you don’t want in local elections.

Then again, the Abe era taught us that voters sometimes forget major scandals rather quickly. The lack of vigour in many regional branches of opposition parties hasn’t disappeared, either; despite the first problematic inflation in decades and LDP politicians across the country being caught cordially greeting predatory cults, the ‘regular’ opposition has only managed to mount even a credible campaign for perhaps two of the nine prefectural governorships up for grabs – and they’re behind in the polls in both. Likewise, over a third of constituencies in prefectural assemblies are going uncontested due to lack of candidates (as in, three people putting their names forward for a three-seat constituency), and the medium-sized-constituency system in play in prefectures and designated cities can itself be a barrier to change, limiting marginal seats to those with enough LDP voters to support about one and a half LDP candidates, or two and a half, et cetera.

The Polls

One final point of note on Japanese polling itself. Japanese pollsters do not weight their numbers; in other words, the custom is to publish the poll results as they arrive, no matter what the sample looks like. In the west, however, the custom is to use the poll results as base evidence for what the numbers would be if the sample was perfectly representative of the electorate, and then publish those modified numbers. The key factor to watch out for at the moment is age, as your typical Japanese pollster tends to heavily oversample older voters. Just look at the most recent NHK poll, which freely admits that over a third of its sample was over 70 years old and that they did nothing about it. Go2Senkyo tries to fix this by publishing two unweighted polls at once from different pollsters, which is why every Gunosy poll you see on Asia Elects looks weird next to all the others: it’s conducted online and so only targets younger voters.

Why is this important now? There are various signs from various pollsters, whether traditional (Asahi), experimental (SSRC), or foreign and weighted (Morning Consult), that the age breakdown of government approval has reversed since 2019. Older people, often with stronger pacifist values, were the most likely to disapprove of Abe, but it’s the young who have most objection to Kishida’s old-school politics. The recent spike in Kishida’s approval also seems to have been driven by older voters.

What does this mean for the unified locals? It’s hard to say. On one hand, voters critical of Kishida are being systematically undersampled, so if young voters turn out against the LDP, said party might be in for a nasty shock. On the other, that’s a big if, especially in local elections, so Kishida being stronger specifically with older voters might mean the LDP are in for a better night than 2019.

The head-to-head polls (jōsei chōsa) mentioned in the elections section below are not the same polls as the approval ones (yoron chōsa), and the custom in Japan is not to publish the actual numbers for a head-to-head poll at all, rather to use vague words such as “leading” and “in a dead heat” to hint at what the poll results were. However, there is no evidence to suggest that the custom for weighting these numbers is any different from regular polls; the commissioners are usually the same people.

Now, on to the actual elections.

The Elections: Governors

Kanagawa (pop. 9,127,323)

• Masako Kishi (Ind. backed by JCP [Left])
• Ken’ichirō Katō (Ind.)
• Yūji Kuroiwa (Ind. backed by LDP [Conservative], Komei [Centre-right], and DPP [Centre-right]) (3-term incumbent)
• Ayaka Ōtsu (N-Koku (*))

Kanagawa is the most populous prefecture with a gubernatorial election on the 9th, but this election looks to have been decided before it began. Former newscaster Yūji Kuroiwa has never faced a competitive election, including his first win in 2011 as a de facto LDP candidate whom the then-nationally ruling DPJ (Centre-left) were coaxed into endorsing. Not much has happened to Kuroiwa since and he has kept his broad establishment coalition going; Masako Kishi was also Kuroiwa’s only opponent four years ago. Ayaka Ōtsu is technically the leader of N-Koku since Takashi Tachibana resigned last month and is the face of the party’s most recent rebranding to the “Female Politicians 48 Party”; how well she fares may be more interesting than the final margin of victory for the decidedly dull Kuroiwa.

Osaka (pop. 8,838,908)

• Mayumi Taniguchi (Ind. backed by LDP and CDP [Centre-left])
• Toshiaki Yoshino (Sansei [Right])
• Kōtarō Tatsumi (Ind. backed by JCP)
• Hirofumi Yoshimura (Ishin [Libertarian]) (1-term incumbent)
• Hideya Inagaki (Kunimori [Conservative])
• Sayaka Sato (N-Koku)

Osaka is Japan’s second most populous prefecture during the day, when much of Kanagawa commutes to Tokyo for work, and this is the most high-profile contest of these local elections. Hirofumi Yoshimura is Japan’s only officially partisan governor and, more importantly, the co-leader and de facto public face of Ishin, gaining prominence during the Covid-19 pandemic for his numbers-based response – although it is also worth noting that Osaka ranks highest in the nation for Covid deaths per capita. The Ishin local government’s policies, including a proposal to build a casino on an artificial island in Osaka Bay, are locally divisive, but in recent years Ishin has gained an electoral edge over the fractured opposition. If Yoshimura somehow lost this election, it would be the story of the night, but polls suggest he will win it easily with Taniguchi in second.

Hokkaido (pop. 5,383,579)

• Yoshio Monbetsu (Ind.)
• Naomichi Suzuki (Ind. backed by LDP, Komei, and Daichi [Centre-right]) (1-term incumbent)
• Maki Ikeda (Ind. backed by CDP, JCP, DPP, SDP [Centre-left], and NET [Centre-left])
• Daisuke Mihara (Ind.)

Japan’s northernmost large island is one single prefecture owing to it not being part of Japan for most of the nation’s history. Hokkaido has long been seen as fertile ground for the opposition, with former DPJ prime minister Yukio Hatoyama being elected from a Tomakomai-area district, and former MP Maki Ikeda is likely a strong candidate. Furthermore, the entire opposition bloc, right up to the DPP, has backed Ikeda, making this the only straightforward government-versus-opposition governor race of the nine. However, polls show a likely victory for incumbent Suzuki, who was the youngest governor in Japan when elected and who has had a rather mixed record since.

Nara (pop. 1,365,008)

• Makoto Yamashita (Ishin)
• Sho Hiraki (Ind. backed by prefectural LDP chapter and CDP)
• Itsuzō Oguchi (Ind. backed by JCP)
• Shōgo Arai (Ind. backed by DPP) (4-term incumbent)
• Nobuko Nishiguchi (Ind.)
• Takashi Hatano (Ind.)

The race for governor of Nara looks set to be the most nationally intriguing of these nine. Arai, a four-term incumbent with a taste for large public works projects, is unpopular, having only won the last election on a plurality. It would appear that the local LDP, recently taken over by right-wing heavyweight Sanae Takaichi, has noticed, and Takaichi has worked to move her party’s support away from Arai and towards her parliamentary secretary Hiraki. While some in the local LDP still back Arai, he has fallen behind Hiraki in the polls. What is more surprising, however, is that Hiraki has himself marginally fallen behind Yamashita. Ishin (or any party other than the LDP) winning a governorship with a partisan may be the headline-worthy possible event of the night most likely to actually happen, so keep an eye on Nara.

Ōita (pop. 1,166,729)

• Kiichirō Satō (Ind. backed by LDP and Komei)
• Kiyoshi Adachi (Ind.)

Ōita Prefecture on the island of Kyushu is mostly known for its plentiful hot springs, so perhaps it was destiny that someone in local politics would find themselves in metaphorical hot water to go with the literal. That someone is Kiyoshi Adachi, who has gambled his marginal Upper House seat on winning the governorship of his home prefecture after the 5-term, 20-year incumbent retired. Adachi was an opposition candidate when he won his seat and the various opposition parties have kept varying degrees of distance at his request, but most of their support will likely flow to him anyway. The trouble is, although the race is not settled, said support does not seem to be enough to overcome the support base (soshiki) inherited by Satō from his predecessor. A competitive opposition should be winning a gubernatorial election like this, but it appears unlikely that it will happen, especially as the election, like most, lacks any defining points of local conflict between the candidates.

Fukui (pop. 787,099)

• Tatsuji Sugimoto (Ind. backed by LDP, CDP, and Komei) (1-term incumbent)
• Yukie Kanemoto (JCP)

Of Japan’s five least populated prefectures, four of them have elections today, starting with Fukui. This part of the Hokuriku coast is traditionally rock-solid LDP country, but every so often a competitive election appears here out of nowhere, such as in the Upper House last year. Or, indeed, in the last gubernatorial election, where part of the local LDP, spurred on by Ishin, managed to elect Sugimoto, against the other part of the local LDP, who had teamed up with the CDP and DPP. Those battle lines, however, have since faded to nothing, as even the CDP now backs Sugimoto. This gubernatorial election is likely to be a JCP-versus-the-rest contest of the sort Fukui last saw in 2015, so expect low turnout and a prompt race call at 8pm on the day, despite the prefecture’s importance in national politics as the nuclear power capital of Japan.

Tokushima (pop. 756,063)

• Tōru Miki (Ind.)
• Motonori Furuta (JCP)
• Masazumi Gotōda (Ind.)
• Kamon Iizumi (Ind. backed by LDP) (5-term incumbent)

If you’re going to focus on one gubernatorial election tonight that isn’t Nara, make it Tokushima, on the island of Shikoku, the “last but not least” of the big four. Concentrate now, because this is about to get messy. Here goes. The local LDP was divided four years ago over whether to back Iizumi’s re-election bid, with the local branch of the national party in favour and the party’s prefectural assemblymembers mostly opposed. Notably, Gotōda, then a Lower House MP, also supported Iizumi’s opponent, a former LDP assemblymember. Iizumi fairly narrowly won that election, and what is more, his supporters got their own back on Gotōda, who lost a fair few soshiki to the infighting and lost his seat to an opposition-aligned independent in the 2021 general election. Miki, up until this point a loyal LDP MP in the Upper House, must have seen some sort of weakness, as he jumped into the race against Iizumi earlier this year, only for Gotōda himself to follow suit. Miki is a more respected figure than Gotōda in the party at this point, but amongst the wider electorate, things may be different: although the polls are close between all three conservative candidates (to the extent that the respected Asahi newspaper has pondered whether Gotōda’s apparently rocky relationship with his popular wife might cost him the election), Gotōda apparently has the slight advantage. The saga of Tokushima politics looks set to continue.

Shimane (pop. 694,188)

• Shin’ichi Mukose (JCP)
• Tatsuya Maruyama (Ind. endorsed by LDP, CDP, Komei, DPP) (1-term incumbent)
• Masaaki Moritani (PCKEACU, *)

It is perhaps ironic that Shimane’s most famous historical figure is Greek-born Japanophile Lafcadio Hearn, as this is a deeply rural prefecture in the LDP heartland of Chugoku. This election has all the hallmarks of an all-too-typical rural governor race, with a JCP partisan (the official partisan badge being a sign of weakness) going up against a governor not too far to the right backed by all established parties. Masaaki Moritani, who has absolutely zero chance of winning, seems to have turned his one-man movement to uncover the truth about some sort of cover-up in his home town of Hamada involving the local mayor, a city employee, and alcohol in some shape or form into a gubernatorial campaign. For whatever reason, he has formed his own party for the purpose, the Party to Crush Kubota’s Employee Alcohol Cover-Up. Your correspondent has nothing else to say about Shimane other than admitting that he briefly considered whether to translate Moritani’s party name as Party to Illuminate Kubota’s Alcoholic Concealed Hamada Undersecretary, just for the acronym.

Tottori (pop. 573,648)

• Hideyuki Fukuzumi (JCP)
• Shinji Hirai (Ind. endorsed by LDP, CDP, Komei) (4-term incumbent)

See above, but with one fewer oddball independent. This is the same stretch of Sea of Japan coast, pretty much the same partisan lineup, and even the same sign that the JCP are even weaker than usual as a sole opposing force.

The Elections: Designated Mayors

Osaka (pop. 2,755,626)

• Hideyuki Yokoyama (Ishin)
• Taeko Kitano (Ind. backed by LDP, CDP)
• Yasuhiko Aramaki (Ind.)
• Nepensa (Ind.)
• Toshihiko Yamazaki (Ind.)

The Osaka mayoral election is essentially a version of the simultaneous election for prefectural governor that’s less obviously favourable for Ishin. Nonetheless, the incumbents are still in the lead. Party leading light Ichiro Matsui is retiring from politics, leaving one of the two most powerful posts in Osaka (the idea that the two go together suits Ishin well, who narrowly failed to merge the city and prefecture in two separate referenda but nonetheless want to de facto do it anyway) open. Ishin have opted to defend the post by holding a US-style party primary, which was won by prefectural assemblymember Hideyuki Yokoyama. His chief opponent is former LDP city councillor and long-term Ishin opponent Taeko Kitano, who like her counterpart in the prefectural race is also backed by the mainstream opposition. Unlike in the prefecturals, however, the JCP are not fielding their own candidate in this race. It’s more plausible that Kitano will be able to turn this one around, but don’t hold your breath. (P.S. “Nepensa” is an author running under his pen name, not an immigrant.)

Sapporo (pop. 1,957,338)

• Hideo Kibata (Ind. backed by JCP)
• Katsuhiro Akimoto (Ind. backed by CDP, Daichi, LDP, Komei, DPP) (2-term incumbent)
• Kaoru Takano (Ind.)

Here we see the proof that voters can have short memories. Katsuhiro Akimoto is running with the same coalition as last time (i.e. everyone but the JCP), and looks set to prevail – the closest poll of the four released for this election was the one conducted two weeks before the other three. His chief opponent appears not to be the JCP-backed Kibata, but the truly independent Takano, who is running on a platform to cancel Sapporo’s bid to host the 2030 Winter Olympics. Yes, run by the same IOC that imposed the Summer Olympics on Japan during the Covid pandemic and at one point had 80% of the population wanting to cancel them, and likely sponsored by the same companies currently embroiled in a corruption scandal relating to said Olympics. One might think Takano would have a better chance at this, especially in liberal Sapporo, but apparently not.

Hiroshima (pop. 1,188,649)

• Kazumi Matsui (Ind. backed by LDP and Komei) (3-term incumbent)
• Hiroshi Ōyama (Ind.)
• Atsumi Takami (JCP)

This is Kishida’s home turf, and as one would expect, the LDP incumbent, who also has the backing of the union federation behind most CDP and DPP support, looks set to win easily. Once again, though, one can question where those expectations come from in the first place, in this case because Hiroshima is, well, Hiroshima. The election is set to be dominated by the question of whether Matsui is doing enough to further the city’s stated mission of making sure its tragic past will never be repeated, especially because the G7 will be meeting in the city in May. Nonetheless, the signs still somehow point to another 70-point victory or something along those lines.

Hamamatsu (pop. 781,596)

• Yūsuke Nakano (Ind. backed by LDP and Komei)
• Hiroshi Shimada (Ind. backed by JCP)

Another mayoral election, another clear polling lead for the establishment, although in this case the incumbent is retiring. Hamamatsu is not a fundamentally conservative place – its prefecture, Shizuoka, is one of the few to be run against the wishes of the LDP, and the governor responsible for that is a Hamamatsu man. Other than that, there is little to say about this election: the supposed points of contention are the usual regional revitalisation and depopulation issues, but the candidates are still unlikely to come into direct conflict with one another, a situation which tends to benefit the incumbent.

Sagamihara (pop. 724,850)

• Toshiko Takeshima (SMTK [Centre-left])
• Hiroyuki Nomoto (Ind.)
• Yumiko Tatebe (Ind. backed by JCP)
• Kentarō Motomura (Ind.) (1-term incumbent)
• Kōta Numakura

Sagamihara is a collection of outer suburbs of Tokyo which became a designated city just over a decade ago. The last mayoral election here saw opposition-aligned Motomura defeat the incumbent, formerly backed by the entire establishment in the usual manner, partly because the LDP vote split three ways. This time, too, the local LDP are paralysed, and even though former LDP councillor Numakura is running, the local party agreed to disagree, not urging its supporters to support any specific candidate. This might lead to a more competitive election in different circumstances, but for whatever reason, the polls have Motomura comfortably ahead despite his difficulties getting policies past the city council.

Shizuoka (pop. 680,284)

• Makoto Yamada (Ind.)
• Chika Suzuki (JCP)
• Takashi Namba (Ind. backed by LDP, CDP, Komei, and DPP)

Like in Sagamihara, the elections in Shizuoka City had the potential to split the LDP vote, but it looks like it isn’t happening. Former LDP councillor Yamada has failed to secure the party’s endorsement ahead of former deputy prefectural governor Namba, although both are ahead of the JCP’s perennial Shizuoka-area candidate Suzuki in the polls. This is another contest without an incumbent, and the previous one actually failed to secure a majority last time around, but the pattern remains the same – even when the election should be competitive, it is not necessarily so.

The Elections: Assemblies and Councils

Most of these, like the election in Ibaraki late last year, are dominated by two types of candidate – LDP, and ‘independents’ essentially using the election as an LDP primary where the party endorses the victor from there on in. What is more, national opposition parties are often in government with the LDP at a local level, so even a lost LDP majority might not mean much. Here are a few to look out for, though.

• Hokkaido. The opposition are fighting an uphill battle, but have fielded enough candidates to theoretically break the LDP and Komeito’s majority. It’ll be a long shot though if gubernatorial polls are anything to go by.
• Saitama, Chiba, and Shizuoka. All of these have opposition-aligned governors, and while any path to victory for the opposition (especially in Saitama) would have to go through a lot of independents, said independents might actually have an incentive not to join the LDP.
• Aichi. Look out for the right-wing Genzei Nippon party and if their current tally of assemblymembers – two – increases to a maximum of 13 or falls even further after Nagoya Mayor Takashi Kawamura’s failure to have any effect on the gubernatorial race.
• Osaka. Ishin have an overall majority, but it’s a slim one – will it hold?
• Hyogo, Nara, Kyoto, and Shiga. Ishin are fielding way more candidates than they have incumbents in all of these prefectures, within striking distance of Osaka. The JCP are also seemingly hoping to make gains in Kyoto and Hyogo, although some of this could be token opposition in the rural areas.

The post What to Expect from Japan’s “Unified” Local Elections, First Half appeared first on Asia Elects.

October

The Muhasasa’s overthrow was one of the main demands of the October 2019 protests. It was a spontaneous uprising of Iraqis from multiple sects hoping to reform their country’s economic and political system; ending the Muhasasa was the first goal on many activists’ agendas.

The protesters, who were made up of many factions of Liberals, Nationalists, Secularists, Communists, social activists, youth leaders, and Sadrists, successfully brought down the government in May 2020, leading to a new interim government whose main goal was overseeing early elections. Two prime ministers failed to form a cabinet for a caretaker government during this period and gave up trying to reconcile the different political forces that all wanted different positions. The third attempt by Prime Minister Mustafa Al Kadhimi was finally successful in forming a caretaker government, as Al Kadhimi was a previously unknown intelligence officer that seemed to be inoffensive to any significant political faction in the negotiating tables behind closed doors.

Al Kadhimi’s rule, before and after the promised elections, was characterized by turmoil, violence, and instability as his relationship with the Pro-Iran Popular Mobilization Forces deteriorated due to him being perceived as too friendly to the United States.

Muqtada Al Sadr

A theologian and Shia cleric from the city of Najaf who previously led a rebellion in the south against the U.S Supported Maliki government was the kingmaker during the October protests. He supported the protesters to varying degrees throughout their actions, even though he was part of the Shia political establishment and was seen as just another Iranian-leaning cleric; he saw the protests as an opportunity to weaken his fellow Shia political opponents and gain leverage against them.

He gained power in the Kadhimi government, as Kadhimi seemed reliant on his support and much more friendly to Sadr than the PMF-aligned Fatah Shia bloc. Kadhimi made multiple favorable statements toward Sadr in 2020 and 2021.

Sadr’s power and influence are uniquely entrenched in the minds of his followers, as he inherited a base of popular support among a large section of poor southern Shias from his father, who was one the prominent opposition leaders to Saddam Hussein inside of Iraq; his supporters follow him religiously and fanatically, giving him a unique advantage as he doesn’t have to worry about losing their support through risky political maneuvers as much as any of the other factions.

Despite participating in many governments and forming coalitions with other establishment parties, Sadr still presents himself as a figure of opposition and reform, publicly stating his opposition to the Muhasasa system and foreign intervention inside Iraq, even disavowing Iran’s intervention and presenting himself as an Iraqi nationalist, despite his various links to the Iranian regime.

The Elections

The long-awaited early elections were finally held on the 10th of October, 2021; they were generally seen as a success by the international community, with the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) getting praise from many international bodies, like the UN and EU.

What made this election different from all previous ones was the adoption of a new electoral law, which divided the country into 83 electoral districts. The number of districts was initially based on the 25% quota needed for women in parliament, with each district having a set number of seats corresponding to its population.

However, the elections still exhibited a degree of corruption and dishonesty, and there certainly was some fraud demonstrated by the different parties with no intervention from the authorities, like the mysterious disappearance of an IHEC employee who was carrying classified electoral data on the 20th of September, 20 days before the elections were set to take place. The elections also saw a massive boycott from almost all secular parties, including many which had emerged during the October protests, as well as older established secular parties like the People’s Party for Reform and the Communist Party. The boycotters argued that any election under the current circumstances would be inherently fraudulent and undemocratic.

The aforementioned distrust and apathy for democracy showed itself in this election, with many secular and independent figures boycotting, the stage was left almost completely to establishment parties, with a record low turnout of 41%. 

The results saw a massive victory for the Sadrists, with them gaining a plurality of seats and vowing to ally with the Sunni and Kurdish parties to form a National Majority Government, as opposed to the compromise governments of old. This move would have excluded almost every other Shia party from power, forcing them to put their differences aside and form an anti-Sadrist Shia coalition called the Coordinative Frame to oppose Sadr’s rise to power. 

The Shia House Divided

Sadr wasted no time allying with the KDP and the Progress-’Azm general Sunni coalition (Sovereignty Alliance); combined with some Sadr-aligned independents, they had a majority of seats and were ready to form a government.

The broad alliance quickly gathered in a session to elect a Speaker of Parliament, and most parties agreed that Mohammed Al Halbousi of the Progress Party, the incumbent speaker, should continue his role in a second term; despite being a Sadrist ally of convenience, he was seen as flexible and malleable to serve the interests of all factions.

Halbousi was reelected with a majority of 200 votes after some parliamentary drama and delay involving the most senior member of parliament, Mahmoud Al Mashhadani, who is constitutionally required to chair the speaker election session. He tried to delay the session by faking a faint; after being escorted to the hospital, the session was resumed with no further delays, with the third most senior member in the chamber taking the chair instead.

To say that this was Sadr’s moment would be an understatement. This was what he had been working towards since 2003; the Shia political balance of power that was necessary to placate all equal but opposing factions was no longer necessary; with this victory, Sadr could finally secure his revenge against his Shia rivals that had put down his rebellion in 2008, forcing him to put down his arms and freeze the Mahdi army’s operations, as well as agree to a political alliance.

The Sadrists convened parliament confident in their ability to form a government, but the coordinative frame used a legal loophole to prevent a session to elect a President of the Republic from being held; holding such a session required ⅔ quorum of MPs, and as the Anti-Sadrist frame made up just a little more than a third of parliament, they coordinated a collective boycott of all parliamentary sessions.

Sadr tried negotiating with some factions of the frame, such as the Badr organization and their close affiliates in the Fatah bloc, but vehemently refused to negotiate any deal with Nuri Al Maliki’s State of Law coalition, still holding onto decades-old grudges going back to the Knights’ Charge operation, when the Maliki government destroyed the Sadrist Mahdi Army militia with the help of U.S and coalition forces back in 2008.

Sadr’s negotiations were limited, and he did not agree to change anything about his program or public intentions. Between October and June, he released multiple statements condemning the Muhasasa system and calling for its end while also calling for Iraq to affirm its sovereignty and kick out foreign forces, or at least negotiate terms of their stay “on respectful and mutually beneficial grounds.”

Sadr’s failure to make any real initiatives to attract his rivals to break their boycott, and the coordinative frame’s surprising cohesion and cooperation led to a political deadlock that lasted for eight months, with every single parliamentary session failing due to the aforementioned quorum; as conditions worsened and political tension rose, one side had to budge eventually. He also made many accusative and antagonistic remarks against the Coordinative Frame, the Muhasasa system, and the PMF, vowing to end all when he takes power in a National Majority Government.

The post Iraqi Gridlock: Leadup and Stalemate appeared first on Asia Elects.

Al Sudani; A Return to Establishment.

Iraq finally formed its new government on the 27th of October after almost 13 months of political gridlock following the October 2021 elections.

The new government, headed by Prime Minister Mohammed Shayya’ Al Sudani, is seen as a return to the old Muhasasa system of political division among ethno-sectarian lines.

Background

Al Muhasasa

Since the 2003 US invasion, Iraq has been ruled through a system that maintains a balance of power between its major demographic groups on the basis of a quota in public office for each group.

This Muhasasa system divides political positions, like ministries and directorships, among ethno-sectarian lines. The most obvious example is the division of the three main executive positions of government, as every Prime Minister must be a Shia Arab, every President must be a Kurd, and every Speaker of Parliament must be a Sunni Arab; this convention is not codified into law but has been the de-facto rule for every government since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

This sectarian system is one of the main reasons for Iraq’s failed experiment with democracy, as political candidates are chosen on the basis of sect instead of competence. It is not uncommon for a party that barely gained any seats in parliament to be granted multiple ministerial positions because they represent a particular sect, making the population generally distrustful and apathetic to any democratic process, as voting doesn’t seem to change political personalities or bring about “new faces.” This also fuels corruption as politicians don’t have to be loyal to their constituents to maintain power, and it has been a factor in fueling political violence; people are politically divided among sectarian lines and pushed to support groups that supposedly represent them, creating a culture of hate and distrust.

Factions

Political parties, coalitions, and alliances have been very syncretic and fluid with shifting loyalties and interests, but most actors can be grouped into different factions, depending on their loyalties and interests, most of the most prominent factions in contemporary Iraqi politics can be divided into three houses denoting ethno-sectarian group and loyalty.

The Shia House

The largest of the houses, the Shia house has been the dominating factor in Iraqi politics, as it claims to represent the 60% of Iraqis who are Shia Arabs, its stronghold is in the south and center of the country.

It is also the house most prone to division and in-fighting, as multiple factions inside the house have their own ideological and political interests, as well as degrees of foreign allegiance.

Some prominent factions inside this house are:

• Fatah Coalition, a grouping of multiple Shia militias and pro-Iran personalities generally associated with the popular mobilization forces (PMF), these groups rose to elevated prominence after the 2014-2017 war against ISIS when many people saw them as the last line of defense holding back the Wahabists,
  They are made up of many militia groups directly supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran and are part of its Axis of Resistance.
• Sadrist Bloc, followers of Shia theologian and politician Muqtada Al Sadr, who presents himself as a nationalistic and reformist figure, his image as an outsider and patriot is conflicted by the reality of his participation in multiple governments and tense but existing relationship with Iran.
• State of Law coalition is a grouping of multiple parties and independents led by the Islamic Da’wa Party, with Former Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki at its head, Maliki was the favorite of the U.S in his first term (2006-2010), even participating in joint operations with coalition forces to put down rebels in different parts of the country, but his loyalties shifted towards Iran in his second term (2010-2014).
  They are primarily Islamic conservatives who prioritize the state’s role over all other parties and emphasize Iraq’s role as a mediator between the U.S. and Iran.
• Victory Alliance, a coalition led by Former Prime Minister Haider Al Abadi (2014-2018), its name is a reference to the victory over ISIS that Abadi presided over.
  Originally a splinter group from Maliki’s State of Law, they’ve suffered recent electoral defeats. They share Maliki’s prioritization of the state and international mediation without nearly as many resources and media coverage.
• National Wisdom Movement, a movement led by Shia cleric Ammar Al Hakim, who hails from the prominent Hakim family, the family is known for its contributions to Shia politics and theology but has recently suffered many popular and electoral defeats. Ammar Al Hakim has recently shifted his focus to soft progressivism on social issues, prioritizing the role of women and the youth, but his movement has suffered a lot in terms of popularity due to focusing on the priority of the state and stability, which is what usually attracts people to Maliki or even Abadi more than Hakim.

These parties have had a history of shifting alliances between themselves as they try to maintain a relative balance of power where all parties can have a share of power without any of them gaining too much of it, ensuring that the Muhasasa can never be challenged by a rising star who has ambitions outside of his own house.

It is important to note that the Shia house also includes several secular and non-Islamist parties that don’t identify with the sectarian splits but have a base of primarily southern Shias. They emerged strongly after 2019 and have been looking to expand outwards; some of the most prominent examples are Emtidad and Kanun Dawn.

The Sunni House

Sunni politics has had a trend of dividing during elections and uniting right after them, and the Sunni political leadership knows the limitations of their demographic base, which makes up ~15% of the country, as different Sunni political factions try to outdo and outperform each other in getting an absolute majority of the Sunni vote, with one faction usually succeeding in getting over 60% of Sunnis to support them, the other minor faction joins the senior in an alliance of convenience, to negotiate with the Shia house in government formations on the equal ground without splintering into smaller vulnerable groups.

The main two contemporary factions in the Sunni house today are the  Taqadum (Progress) Party under Speaker of Parliament Mohammed Al Halbousi and the Azm Alliance under Khamis Al Khanjar, with Taqadum being the senior faction, winning more seats and votes than Azm; they were actively hostile in the period leading up to the election in October but reconciled after the elections in a “Sovereignty Alliance”, and as is usual, this alliance didn’t end infighting over positions in Sunni governorates, but it was set up as a platform for unified negotiation with the Shia house.

One minor faction that has significant power in the Sunni Salahuddin province is the Patriotic Masses Party, led by strongman localist Abu Mazin Ahmed Al Juboori, who is a locally popular figure that has dominated Salahuddin politics for the past decade; Abu Mazin aligns himself with the Azm Alliance and has been the target of Taqadum media offensives for his unwillingness to join the Sovereignty Alliance, which goes to show the internal divisions still present in the Sunni house, despite its unification in negotiations with other houses.

The Kurdish House

The main two Kurdish political parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Democratic Party of Kurdistan, have their bases of power and influence mostly inside the Kurdistan Regional Government, with some voters and supporters outside of the KRG from Kurdish minority groups in Diyala, Mosul, and Kirkuk governates.  The PUK and KDP have had a rivalry going back to the Kurdish civil war in the 1990s when they fought each other for control of Kurdish territory.

The PUK has its stronghold in Suleymaniah governorate, where it has been based since its very inception, and it has been the favorite party of the central government after 2003, having exclusive control over the prestigious but mostly symbolic post of President of the Republic.

While the KDP is the dominant party in Erbil and Dohuk governorates, being the main political party in Kurdish politics overall, overtaking its rival in the number of seats in both Kurdish and Central parliaments. 

Both parties are led and centralized around particular political families; the PUK is dominated by the Talabani family, while the KDP is led by the Barzani political tribe. Both of the mentioned families were influential in Kurdish politics before the 1990s.

The rivalry between the two parties has remained strong, even twenty-five years after the civil war; the parties are still hostile to each other and are reluctant to collaborate on any unified Kurdish resolution. Some notable recent attempts were the formation of the Kurdistani Coalition and the Kurdistan List in 2019 and 2009 respectively, which were electoral alliances that included both parties, as an attempt to unify the minority Kurds into a bigger parliamentary group in the green zone, while continuing their competition inside the Kurdistan Regional Government.

These noble attempts at “Brotherhood” seem to have fallen apart before the 2021 elections, with the leadership of each party growing more distrustful of the other. The Kurdistan Coalition served no role in furthering cooperation between the two parties in the 2021 elections, and it seems to be practically defunct.

Minor parties hoping to break the duopoly on power the PUK and KDP possess have had ever-waning chances of success. The most promising examples are the Gorran movement and the New Generation movement, both of whom identify as Liberal or Liberal adjacent parties that desire a break from the rigid structure of Kurdish politics. The Gorran movement, the more senior of the two, had previous electoral successes, getting more votes than the PUK in 2013, but various corruption scandals have rocked the party, and the death of its leader and founder, Nawshirawan Mustafa, pushed the party into losing its popularity just ahead of the 2018 elections. 

The New Generation movement is another opposition party that was formed in 2017, it more strongly adopts a Liberal identity, pushing for economic liberalization and cooperation with the Iraq state on economic issues. It has closely aligned itself to center-left movements in the south like Emtidad, trying to break the ethnic gap that most Kurdish parties have neglected to address; it’s still a new party, but it has shown promise in attracting young voters in 2018 regional and 2021 general elections. 

The post Iraqi Gridlock: Essential Background appeared first on Asia Elects.

A while back, we published an article about the apparently mundane but surprisingly revealing race for governor of Wakayama prefecture. Last time around, we covered the background explanation, of what soshiki-hyō or “organisational votes” are; for readers who have not yet seen it, the important message when talking Wakayama is that a large proportion of Japanese votes are essentially directed by large networks of groups without much of an ideology other than a love of power, and ostensibly the protection of their members’ interests. In rural areas, the vast majority of these soshiki (“organisations”) reliably turn out for the local chapters of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Now we’re caught up, let’s talk Wakayama.

Where is Wakayama anyway, and who lives there?

Wakayama is a prefecture in mid-western Japan, stretching along the southern coast of the Kii peninsula. Its capital is within striking distance of sprawling Osaka, but the prefecture’s other end is mostly made up of remote fishing towns, a world away from urban Japan. Wakayama is known for its UNESCO-listed ancient pilgrimage trails spanning the forested interior, as well as a few famous beaches along the coast. Outside of Japan, however, most people who have heard of Wakayama know it as the centre of Japanese whaling, especially the now-notorious small town of Taiji of The Cove fame.

Like most other remote western prefectures, Wakayama is fiercely conservative. The LDP rule the roost here, and politics tends to be very old-school, soshiki-driven, and personal. One can even see the effects of Wakayama’s political scene as a tourist. The construction industry, a major source of soshiki votes, turns out in force in these parts, so a striking number of local mountains and rivers are encased in concrete.

The long-time king of Wakayama politics goes by the name of Toshihiro Nikai. The Lower House MP for Wakayama’s third district (furthest from the capital), the 83-year-old Nikai spent five years in the extremely powerful post of LDP secretary-general and has led one of the party’s formalised factions for over a decade. He is almost defiantly ‘retro’, one of the few remaining masters of an intensely personal style of politics that ruled Japan before it started to unravel in the 1990s (like everything else, some would say), and that gives him a degree of clout with politicians and soshiki leaders who never learnt the old ways. When, in 2016, agricultural cooperatives in northern Japan helped turf LDP Upper House members out of office in protest at then-PM Shinzō Abe’s love of trade deals, it was Nikai whom the LDP parachuted in to ensure the soshiki returned to the fold before the next election. Likewise, Yoshihide Suga’s sudden rise to frontrunner in 2020’s LDP leadership contest was Nikai’s doing, and some blame Suga’s downfall in October 2021 on his decision to try and placate the backbenches by sacking Nikai a few days earlier. Eric Johnston at the Japan Times calls him a “shadow shogun”.

Were it not for Nikai, Wakayama politics would likely be ruled by another LDP heavyweight, local Upper House member Hiroshige Sekō. Sekō has held his seat since the last millennium and was a close confidant of Abe, for whom he served as economy minister for three years. His CV is undoubtedly impressive, but look what happened when he came into conflict with Nikai.

Ten up, ten down, and one man left standing

Four events shook the usually dull, LDP/soshiki-dominated world of Wakayama politics before the election. In April of 2022, the prefectural assembly revolted against incumbent governor Yoshinobu Nisaka, voting down his flagship plan to attract a casino to the area. The next month, Shūhei Kishimoto, the MP for Wakayama’s first district then sitting with the centre-right Democratic Party for the People (DPP), announced he was challenging an increasingly wobbly Nisaka for the governorship. This proved to be the last straw for Nisaka, and he made his own decision in June not to contest the autumn election.

The fourth event took place in Tokyo, far from Wakayama, but was perhaps the most important of them all. The Diet moved closer to passing a bill aimed at ensuring no Lower House district had more than twice as many voters as any other. In order to ensure that the most populated district only had 1.999 (no, really) times as many voters as the least, ten new Lower House districts were to be created, all but one in greater Tokyo, and ten in rural areas would vanish. One of these doomed ten happened to be Wakayama’s third, represented by Nikai. Complicating things further was Sekō’s personal wish to switch houses from Upper to Lower (why that is is not obvious, unless he has unlikely prime ministerial ambitions).

The local LDP found itself, as they say, in disarray. Kishimoto was personally popular in his district and conservative enough to avoid turning off soshiki-type voters, so they needed an equally well-known candidate to push through and avoid an embarrassing loss in an otherwise happy hunting ground. The first candidate mooted was the MP for Wakayama’s second district, sandwiched between Kishimoto and Nikai, but he refused. Sekō then moved to secure the LDP’s endorsement for a candidate close to him, a bureaucrat parachuted in from northern Japan, ensuring greater control over the Wakayama political scene if he won.

It was at this point that Nikai leapt. No upstart former economy minister was going to lay claim to his backyard on his watch.

This is where the soshiki come in. Although differences in factional and soshiki support can sometimes lead to two de facto LDP candidates standing at once, Nikai knew that such a move was unlikely to work. So he drew close… to Kishimoto. He got to work with his personality-politics magic, convincing his loyal soshiki in construction and elsewhere to back Kishimoto over the official LDP candidate. The endorsements piled up, and ultimately the local LDP had no choice but to declare the northern bureaucrat’s campaign “difficult” and throw its weight behind the nominally independent Kishimoto. The true victor, however, was not Kishimoto, but Nikai, happy that at 83 he could still wield a power base with the best of them. Sekō, meanwhile, had to endure a humiliating press conference explaining the LDP’s decision.

The vote, not to be confused with the bit that matters

And so we come to November and the election campaign. The true contest, between Nikai and Sekō, had already been resolved, and in a weird twist of fate, an opposition MP had become the LDP candidate as a result. The mainstream opposition parties, like in most other prefectures, also coalesced around the same candidate as the LDP (a phenomenon known as ainori; the previous article explains this more). The only true electoral opposition, therefore, came from candidates with less of a chance to win. Two, to be precise.

The Japanese Communist Party (JCP) have never had any truck with soshiki other than their own party-focused one, and so fielded their own candidate, former city councillor Michiko Matsuzaka. JCP supporters point to this as proof they are the only principled opposition to the old boys’ network, but their refusal to endorse ainori has left them mistrusted by almost every other party, a situation made worse by lingering doubts about the word “communist” in their name and their unreformed “democratic centralist” party management. JCP candidates often try to alleviate this by standing as official independents and giving their campaigns a “citizens’ movement” image, but Matsuzaka stood as a JCP partisan, usually a sign of local weakness.

The other candidate standing was Nana Honma. Honma is a former leader of the small, economically leftist but socially strongly conservative Kunimori party. She also stood against Nikai in the 2021 general election, but before that, had no obvious connections to Wakayama; her previous political activity was mostly in Aichi and Hokkaido. Given Kunimori’s rhetoric (the party name literally means “protectors of the country”), it seems likely that Honma entered Wakayama politics out of anger at Nikai specifically, and particularly at his strikingly welcoming stance on China.

The campaign passed without much comment; the local issues were the same as ever, guaranteed by Kishimoto dodging the closest thing to a potential flashpoint, the casino issue. Westerners reading this might expect whaling to be a political issue, but it’s not that contentious in Wakayama. (For what it’s worth, Honma believes it should continue as a matter of national pride in the face of foreign criticism; Matsuzaka did not comment, although a JCP policy statement in 2008 reflects a moderate position, banning only the hunting of endangered species; and Kishimoto has called for reform in the past but was silent during the election. Some, of course, see the latter and suspect Nikai’s hand at work.)

Ultimately, Kishimoto cruised to victory with over 80% of the vote, surprising nobody. All the surprises, after all, happened over the summer. So. What does this say about local politics in Japan?

Despair, betrayal, or good old Japanese defeatism?

The personal battles rage on, with Nikai now in a stronger position in the chess (or should that be go?) match between himself and Sekō. The game has not ceased; Nikai, having backed the casino and also having failed to elect his son as mayor of the city of Gobō in 2016, has already tasted hubris and has no desire to do so again. The next moves will concern this year’s by-election for Kishimoto’s empty Diet seat, in which Nikai wants to see a weak LDP candidate willing to be forced out in the boundary changes, while Sekō looks to take the seat for himself and push Nikai into a bitter selection fight for the other one in the process.

What is missing from all this is any reference to, well, Wakayama. In Tokyo’s corridors of power, the fate of one of the most defining political careers of the last decade is far more important than that of some Kansai backwater, and this echoes through each temple and fishing port. The closest thing to a divisive local issue, the casino debate, was stifled in the face of an overwhelmingly powerful candidate with an unclear position, and there was no real attempt to rise up against the soshiki ‘establishment’ for failing to stop Wakayama’s demographic and economic decline during Nisaka’s 16-year reign. The JCP are treated as almost theatre, a performance by people who will never win, and most other opposition parties fell behind Kishimoto. Even the genuinely novel Honma still finished on about 10% of the vote.

The Wakayamans, like much of Japan, seem bereft of any hope in politics. People in Nikai’s district don’t necessarily like him, but most will respect his ability to ‘do’ what is seen as practical politics, especially when put next to an opposition variously seen as incompetent and laughable. Any idea that politics does not have to revolve around ainori, the LDP, and deftly securing funding for the newest concrete mountain is seen as hopelessly idealistic. Hence the turnout rate – under 40 percent – and the soshiki, who thrive because their relatively low numbers can still decide election results when most other voters see electoral politics as a lost cause.

Thus, it can be said that the race for Wakayama governor stood out not only for its complexity, but for the nature of its complexity. Only time will tell whether Nikai or Sekō will put down the next stone, or indeed, whether anything will happen away from the board. The LDP and its soshiki can often seem unimaginably vast, like a whale; but since when has that stopped the Wakayamans?

The post <strong>A Yama Gets Wacky: Politics Lessons from a Paradoxical Election, Part Two</strong> appeared first on Asia Elects.

Last month, a Japanese prefecture (think state or province in other countries) elected its governor, after the previous one announced his decision to retire after sixteen years in office. A candidate backed by roughly the same coalition of parties as the incumbent, including the national ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and mainstream opposition forces, soon became so favoured to win that nobody even bothered to poll the race. He ultimately won on the day with over 80 percent of the vote, defeating two challengers, one from the Japan Communist Party (JCP) and the other an independent without major partisan support. Turnout stayed stubbornly below 40% for the third election in a row, perhaps not surprising when the last time a gubernatorial vote here was truly competitive was almost three decades ago.

Admit it; unless you’ve been following Asia Elects or live in the prefecture in question, you have no idea where in Japan I’m talking about, because about three-quarters of the time, you’re going to hear the same story atop every mountain and along every shore of these islands each time someone chooses their governor. As it turns out, the prefecture in question was Wakayama, in southern Kansai, but it could have been anywhere. Or could it?

When is an ainori not an ainori?

Granted, there are some parts of this election that really were the same as anywhere else; first and foremost, the pattern of candidates standing. Candidates backed by both the national government and main opposition (known as ainori kōhosha in Japanese) account for about half of Japan’s prefectural governors and are common in other types of local election too. There are several theories commonly used to explain this: Japan’s system of local funding is tied to the central bureaucracy, so ex-bureaucrat pro-LDP candidates have an unbeatable advantage when ‘pork-barrelling’; supporting a strong incumbent is in the interests of local politicians with an agenda to push; the mainstream opposition don’t want to embarrass themselves by fielding candidates who they know will lose anyway, and so on. Such theories are open to question; for example, what’s the advantage, vote-wise, of getting money from central government for projects voters don’t want anyway?

But this story is not actually about ainori. At one point, the Wakayama governorship was not even expected to have an ainori candidate. Why that was is hinted at by the identity of the victor: Shuhei Kishimoto, until he stood for this election, served as an MP for the Democratic Party for the People (DPP), a centrist mainstream opposition party.

There is one other aspect of Japanese local politics worth exploring in more detail before diving into the Wakayama story. This is the phenomenon of the soshiki-hyō or “organisational vote”, the means by which candidates who may seem mediocre or unsuited to their local area can count on tens of thousands of votes being sent their way every time election season comes around. Given how many races are decided by these votes, and how Japanese-language media treats their existence as common knowledge without need of any explanation, the fact that they are all but ignored by anglophone media (a search of the Japan Times archive reveals exactly one reference to “organisational voting” and none at all to the Japanese phrase) feels rather odd. So first, let us look at these soshiki-hyō a little more closely, and save the actual story of what happened in Wakayama, closely linked to these “organisations”, for part two.

Soshiki-hyō, or the postcard-from-your-boss voter base

The basic pattern of a soshiki-hyō reaching a candidate looks something like this. The leader of the Wakayama City Association of Noodle Shop Owners wants to make sure that any policies passed are good for his (it’s almost always a his) organisation, soshiki in Japanese, so he sidles up to local politicians that look like they’ll be elected and offers his support if he gets something in return. This support can take the form of direct funding, in the form of paid annual kōenkai (“support group”) membership guaranteeing chances to talk to the politician face-to-face, or it can take the form of promises to funnel votes from the organisation’s members to the politician. Having made the promise, the organisational head then has to lobby the noodle magnates surrounding him, promising them that their noodle businesses will prosper if they maintain good relations with the politician. This chain of promises and of social pressure to follow the boss cascades down through Wakayama’s noodle industry until each shop owner is singing the praises of their soshiki candidate to the staff, and come election time, their votes flow to the politician at the centre of it all, now indebted to the organisation to the point that their opponents, were this the West, would accuse them of being ‘in the pocket of Big Noodle’ or some such phrase. This system is often helped by particularly zealous soshiki members sending postcards to their friends, acquaintances, employees, and so forth, complete with a big picture of the politician’s face and a standardised format that makes it obvious what is being asked of the recipient.

Most local district-level soshiki networks, the ones responsible for weird-looking election results such as hipsterish bits of Tokyo being represented by hard-right LDP members, are made up of hundreds or thousands of these relationships, held together with a fair few personal friendships and connections up and down the political ladder. If a particularly large organisation becomes part of a politician’s network of soshiki, such as the local agricultural cooperative (an LDP classic) or a major employer’s trade union (a mainstream-opposition classic), they have the potential to flip districts on their own. One could see this in action in the Upper House in 2016, when the LDP lost most of their seats in the rural north due to those prefectures’ agricultural cooperatives rising up in revolt against then-PM Shinzō Abe’s support of an unpopular trade deal.

Incidentally, this is the real reason why so many politicians in Japan are dynastic, why it is so much easier to be elected in Gunma prefecture if your surname is Nakasone. Apparently, it is a lot easier for a politician to convince their soshiki network to back their successor when the latter is a blood relation. There are other ways to ‘transfer’ soshiki, though, as Yasushi Katsume proved when he won Kyoto’s 1^st district in 2021 with a campaign entirely based around his endorsement by previous, soshiki-laden incumbent Bunmei Ibuki.

How to get endorsed by the Buddha in the proportional block: national soshiki-hyō

Soshiki networks can also operate at a national level. Companies or unions from the same industry can team up behind one politician, often in the Upper House’s national proportional block, to deliver votes from every corner of the land, allowing their chosen politician to leapfrog other candidates of the same party and making sure that the industry’s ‘voice’ gets heard in parliament. Soshiki-type tactics are also commonly used by other types of organisation; perhaps the most feared soshiki of them all is that of the Sōka Gakkai, a Buddhist sect (there is much argument over how to describe it) that claims to have over eight million members in Japan. Sōka members, plus the friends they diligently send postcards to, account for almost the entire voter base of the Kōmei party, currently the junior national coalition partner.

And yes, while we’re on the subject of religion, the Unification Church, the Korean-based cult better known as the Moonies whose family-wrecking practices and close ties to LDP politicians have been the top news story in Japanese politics for half a year now, are also a soshiki. While most UC support for the LDP has been in the form of directing its followers to volunteer for the party at large, it has been all but statistically proven that Upper House member Yoshiyuki Inoue secured his proportional seat by using the UC’s believers as his soshiki. Inoue’s vocal rejection of LGBT rights, also passionately opposed by the UC, can be no coincidence.

“Do people really do this?”: when soshiki stop working

The idea of a soshiki, especially for people at several degrees of separation from the actual politician, leaves a lot of questions unanswered for the non-Japanese observer. How does social pressure work when everyone is entitled to a secret ballot? How can the LDP balance the interests of all these presumably conflicting interest groups without some of them rebelling? And who, who on earth, decides who to vote for by waiting for a postcard from their boss? The answers to these are not entirely clear, but they seem to relate to issues faced by the Japanese system as a whole. A very high level of political apathy and a widespread feeling that only the LDP actually know how to operate the levers of power can lead to low turnout and even small soshiki having oversized influences on election results.

It is fitting, then, that the one known ‘antidote’ to soshiki in an election is that rare and precious thing, a mass outpouring of political sentiment. In 2005, Japan’s citizens decided to back then-PM Koizumi’s reformist agenda by voting for his“assassins”, candidates (including future Tokyo governor Yuriko Koike) parachuted in by Koizumi to defeat soshiki-backed rebels stripped of party support. By 2009, though, the old LDP had reared its balding head once more, and the effect repeated, local organisations across the country swept away as voters reminded their old masters of the taste of defeat. The soshiki only re-emerged in 2012, when turnout crashed once more and the LDP put most of its organisational politicians right back in the seats they had only just left. While voters since then have largely gone back to the old patterns of despair, one can still find the odd sign that history might repeat: Kiyomi Tsujimoto’s fearsome soshiki not being enough to save her Osaka 10^th district as Nippon Ishin no Kai’s policy-driven campaign swamped Kansai last year, for instance. And yes, that year, Osaka saw a larger turnout spike than any other prefecture.

Specific local effects can also overcome a soshiki. Part of what makes these long-distance personal connections, only rarely based on policy in the first place, so effective is that Japanese voters have few chances to hear about reasons not to vote for specific candidates. Some of this is down to Japan’s strict election laws; there are so few methods available for politicians to interact with voters that, according to research, senkyo kā, the infamous vans that blare out politicians’ names at what everyone agrees is way too many decibels, actually do attract votes. Some of it, though, is due to a general political culture of candidates almost never running any sort of ‘attack ad’ against their opponents, however much there may be to criticise. When a politician does appear in the news and alert their constituents to their actions, they are more likely to experience a sudden swing against them in their district. One of the 2021 Lower House election’s most dramatic results happened in Chiba’s 8^th district, where scandal-hit junior minister Yoshitaka Sakurada (most famous overseas as the cybersecurity minister who had to admit he didn’t know how to use a computer) managed to lose badly enough that a safe LDP district was transformed into a safe CDP one overnight.

Such is the way of Japan’s soshiki politics: like a woolly mammoth, it required very specific conditions to evolve, but having done so positively thrives, right up until the day conditions change and a new kind of politics makes itself known. In part two, I’ll explore what all this meant in Wakayama, where even as the world warmed around it, the mammoth blundered happily forward.

The post <strong>A Yama Gets Wacky: Politics Lessons from a Paradoxical Election, Part One</strong> appeared first on Asia Elects.