Lesson from Japan on the peril of taking voters for granted

Despite a weak opposition and the switch to a new party leader, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party was unable to escape the electorate's anger.

- Ravi Velloor

Shigeru Ishiba's whipsawing political fortunes following his surprise emergence as Japan's leader in late September, only to be followed swiftly by a huge electoral rebuke within a month, holds lessons for entrenched parties around the world in nations that hold regular elections.

Top of those lessons must surely be the perils of taking voters for granted.

Mr Ishiba's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has held power for most of the years since its founding in 1955, apparently mid-wifed by the US Central Intelligence Agency to counter surging leftist forces. The stutters - first, from 1993 to 1994, and later, from 2009 to 2012 - were short-lived, periods that voters tired of quickly, and restored LDP to power.

The general refrain used to be that Japanese voters, when asked to choose, would look around and eventually conclude that there was no sense rocking the boat.

Thus, the LDP - faction-riddled, prone to trading favours, and sometimes corrupt - would prevail.

Combined with the powerful iron frame of Japanese bureaucracy, this allowed the nation and its dominant party to project the "stability" that has been Japan's hallmark in a world where many great powers - the US, Russia, perhaps China and India even - are enduring a time of anomie, a period marked by the disruption of social bonds, sense of confusion, and second-guessing on what were thought to be settled ideologies, such as globalisation being a good thing.

Looking back at the events of the past six weeks, it would appear that Mr Ishiba's rise to national leadership, emerging from a slate of nine contenders, came as a bit of a surprise to even himself. In the first round, which saw a surge from Ms Sanae Takaichi, he placed second. It was only in the next round that he prevailed, and then by a mere 21 votes.