DPJ facing potential shortage of candidates in proportional section > Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion

The Democratic Party of Japan, heavily favored in a series of pre-election polls, is facing the prospect of having to give up some of the seats it is expected to win in Sunday's lower house election. This may happen if the party scores a big enough win to secure seats for more than the number of candidates it has fielded under the proportional representation system, in which seats are allocated according to the share of votes a political party has garnered.

``It would be a waste but there's nothing we can do about it,'' an official of the main opposition party said Friday. The voter preference shown in opinion polls is beyond the expectations of the party, which has put a record 59 people on the proportional representation voting list for House of Representatives seats. The odds are increasing that all of them could secure seats along with those with ``double candidacies'' listed in both single-seat constituencies and proportional representation blocks.

My concern is that, like the anti-LDP coalition led by Hosokawa and Ozawa in the early 1990's, this defeat of the LDP will only be temporary and eventually will recede to give way again to the status quo ante.

Do you see any indications that this time the change will be more permanent?  Will the DPJ's victory be imposing enough to overcome huge obstacles and inertia in the Japanese government apparatus to make changes sought for by the Japanese public?  Or have the LDP's blunders been so great that mere consistent competence be enough to secure the long-term political viability of the DPJ?

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.