Japan PM faces reckoning in upper house elections

Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba faces a reckoning from voters on Sunday with upper house elections that could end his premiership and see a right-wing populist party make inroads.

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With many Japanese hurt by rising prices, especially for rice, opinion polls suggest that Ishiba’s governing coalition could lose its majority in the upper house.

This could be the final nail for Ishiba, having already been humiliatingly forced into a minority government after lower house elections in October.

“Ishiba may need to step down,” Toru Yoshida, a politics professor at Doshisha University, told AFP.

Japan could “step into an unknown dimension of the ruling government being a minority in both the lower house and the upper house, which Japan has never experienced since World War II,” Yoshida said.

At one of Tokyo’s polling stations on Sunday, 54-year-old voter Atsushi Matsuura told AFP “Commodity prices are going up, but I am more worried that salaries aren’t increasing.”

Another voter Hisayo Kojima, 65, expressed frustration that the amount of her pension “is being cut shorter and shorter”.

“We have paid a lot to support the pension system. This is the most pressing issue for me,” she said.

Ishiba’s centre-right Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has governed Japan almost continuously since 1955, albeit with frequent changes of leader.