In Japan the centre-right party in government, the Liberal Democratic Party (PLD), lost all three seats for which it voted in Sunday’s by-elections: the seats, until now occupied by deputies of the LDP, went to the three candidates of the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, the main opposition party. The result of the by-elections was interpreted as further confirmation of the crisis that the Japanese government has been going through for some time now, having ended up at the center of a series of scandals and whose consensus has reached its historic low this year.
Sunday’s by-elections were held in Tokyo, Shimane and Nagasaki constituencies. The most contested seat was that of Shimane, free following the death of the former Speaker of the House Hiroyuki Hosoda, involved like other influential members of the LDP in the scandals that have hit the party in recent months. The first concerned the ties between Kishida’s party and the Unification Church, a religious group spread mainly in the United States and East Asia that has millions of members and is considered by many to be rather similar to a sect. The second scandal, the most recent, concerns alleged funds collected irregularly by influential members of Kishida’s party: it is the most serious in recent decades for Japanese conservatives and has led to the resignation and arrests of various members of the government.
The result of Sunday’s by-elections is making the hypotheses, already circulated in recent months, of a possible replacement of Kishida at the helm of the party even more concrete: elections are scheduled for next September elections within the party to elect the new president, who will also become the prime minister until the next general elections, scheduled for July 2025: in Japan, in fact, the leader of the majority party is by convention also the prime minister.
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