Here's a wikibox for the 1997 Japanese election, a follow-up to
this post.
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The 1997 Japanese general election was held on the 16th July 1997, to elect 500 members to the House of Representatives of Japan, the lower house of the country’s legislature, the National Diet. It was the first election to use the new mixed-member proportional system that was implemented by the first Doi government to replace the old SNTV (single non-transferable vote) system.
The 1993-7 term had been somewhat dramatic, as since the previously dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) had lost its overall majority and public opinion was very unfavourable to Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa remaining in power, a multi-party coalition led by moderate Socialist Takako Doi took over. Doi’s first term lasted just over 12 months, when in mid-1994, a conflict with her coalition partners and Cabinet members Ichirō Ozawa and Tsotumu Hata of the Japan Renewal Party (JRP) led them to leave the coalition and align with the LDP, whose leader in Opposition, former Prime Minister from 1989-91 Toshiki Kaifu, secured a second term with their backing.
Kaifu’s second term would see him, the LDP and by association the JRP become deeply unpopular, as under their watch the Great Hanshin Earthquake and the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo Subway shook residents of the nation’s two biggest metropolitan areas, and Kaifu incurred the ire of the Chinese and Korean governments for his non-apology for Imperial Japan’s actions on the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II.
Further harming the LDP was the decision in December 1995 of Ozawa and Hata to relaunch the JRP as the New Frontier Party (NFP), which despite its largely unchanged policy agenda did manage to carve out a decent foothold for itself by unifying the minor parties that had split from the LDP, though its continued support of the Kaifu government pushed anti-government voters towards the Socialists.
Meanwhile, Doi had stood down as Socialist leader and her replacement, the more ‘traditional’ Socialist Tomiichi Murayama, successfully managed to court the centre-left Democratic Socialist and Socialist Democratic Parties to rejoin with the main Socialists, initially to form a joint ticket for the 1995 House of Councillors election; when the Socialists scored a resounding victory over the LDP in that election, this gave Murayama the leverage to reunite the three parties for the first time since the early 1950s. While some on the party’s left were becoming uncomfortable with its continuing shift away from traditional socialism, the Japanese public as a whole were warming to them against the LDP, which was increasingly seen as corrupt and unfit to govern.
Despite this, many Japanese voters did not have as favourable a view of Murayama as they did of Doi, perceiving the former as too leftist and inexperienced with government. As a result, the two made an agreement in late 1995 that once the next election was called, Doi would return to the leadership for the campaign, and once in power, Murayama would be given a senior position in Doi’s second Cabinet. Doi also made it clear to Murayama that if the public’s opinion of him became more favourable, she might back him to become Prime Minister later on. This mostly allayed the concerns of both the Socialist rank-and-file and the leadership, and was handled more tactfully than the spats between Kaifu and his coalition partners.
The House of Representatives was dissolved in June 1997 around the very end of the full 4-year term, the first time since 1976 that this had happened rather than a dissolution occurring early. Despite their traditional dominance and continued status as the largest party in the House, the LDP were widely expected to lose; their traditional reliance on the
koenkai (local campaign organisations for their members, similar to how the Socialists traditionally had the support of trade unions and the Kōmeitō of the Soka Gakkai movement) had not really evolved to fit the new electoral system, and as mentioned, Kaifu had spent over seven years as Prime Minister by this point and was greatly unpopular.
Once Doi took over as Socialist leader at the start of June, the Socialists’ leads in the polls rapidly widened as swing voters gravitated towards the former Prime Minister. However, it is important to clarify that this gravitation towards the Socialists was not the Japanese public embracing socialism after over 50 years of rejecting it electorally; amusingly enough, the politician Doi most evoked comparison with in the Japanese press was Margaret Thatcher. Ideologically, though, she was far closer to contemporary ‘Third Way’ socialist party leaders in Europe like Tony Blair, Lionel Jospin, Wim Kok or Gerhard Schroder in the sense that her priority was very much leftist electability at the cost of leftist ideology.
The result Doi got was similarly successful to those parties in elections held around this time, too. For the first time in 50 years, the Socialists managed to become the biggest party in the House of Representatives, and for the only time in their history (as of 2021), they won an overall majority of the chamber’s seats. Meanwhile, the Communists grew from 15 seats to 20, benefitting from the Socialists’ rightward shift. The LDP, the NFP and the Kōmeitō, which had uniformly supported the government since 1994, were routed, with the LDP securing just 149, the NFP only 37, and the Kōmeitō 17 of the 500 House seats.
Perhaps because of the aforementioned crises in both cities, the LDP were shut out of Osaka and the Tokyo region in the FPTP seats. They also lost the PR vote in every block except Shikoku and Chūgoku. After the election, Kaifu resigned as party leader and left politics, and the LDP began a 14-year period in opposition, the longest in its history.
Despite its massive losses, the New Frontier Party was considered by Ozawa and Hata, who both retained their FPTP seats easily, to have survived a baptism of fire, and quickly started to distance itself from the LDP (something they found easy with Kaifu gone); ironically, when the two of them refounded the party once again as the Liberal Party the following year, it quickly became a centrist ally of the Socialists, and has remained so ever since.
(Credit to Utgard96/AJRElectionMaps for the basemap btw- here it is up close for anyone who's interested