The Fallen Of Japanese Political Party Giant

Japan's main opposition Democratic Party leader Yukio Hatoyama (l.) and former leader and chief campaign strategist Ichiro Ozawa react, as results start to come in, at the Democratic Party of Japan election headquarters in Tokyo, Sunday.
Kim Kyung-Hoon/ Reuters

Why Japan lost faith in the LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) ?

The DPJ(Democratic Party Japan), a broadly based party with a generally center-left bent, is not expected to make radical changes either to Japan's economic policy or its foreign policy.

It won the Diet election because, after years of falling living standards and political paralysis, Japanese voters finally lost faith in their long-time rulers.

"People want a party that can do something," says Tobias Harris, who runs the perspicacious observingjapan.com website. "They are not convinced that the DPJ is that party, but they are 100 percent convinced that the LDP is not that party."

Tokyo - Voters ushered in a new era in Japanese politics Sunday, throwing out the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) after 54 years of nearly unbroken rule.

Instead, in elections to the lower house of parliament, they chose the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) and its promises of a fresh approach to pull Japan out of decades of economic and political stagnation.

Exit polls gave the DPJ more than 300 seats in Japan's 480-seat Diet (parliament), an overwhelming victory that reveals the depths of disillusion with the ruling LDP.
"Japan has become a normal democracy," says Robert Pekkanen, a Japan expert at the University of Washington. "For better or worse, from now on we will see an alternation of power."

The LDP had been out of office for less than a year since the founding of Japan's post-war political system. Exhausted, beset by scandals and bereft of popular ideas or leaders, the party suffered a landslide defeat that marks a turning point in Japanese political life, analysts say.

"21st century politics in Japan has started in 2009," says Akikazu Hashimoto, a professor at Oberlin University in Tokyo. "There is no going back. This is a tectonic shift in the Japanese system as a whole."