By Motoko Rich, Kiuko Notoya and Hisako Ueno

TOKYO — Japan’s governing party was projected to lose its majority in parliamentary elections Sunday (27), according to exit polls, as voters delivered an emphatic rejection of the status quo, throwing Japanese politics into its most uncertain period in years.

The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has governed Japan for all but four years since 1955, was on pace to lose dozens of seats in an election for the House of Representatives, the influential lower chamber of parliament, according to the national broadcaster, NHK.

For more than a decade, elections in Japan had taken on a rubber-stamp quality for the conservative Liberal Democrats. This time, a wearied public angered by a long-simmering political finance scandal, rising inflation and the burdens of raising families inflicted a humiliating blow to the party just one month after it anointed Shigeru Ishiba as the new prime minister.

The exit polls showed that the LDP would be unable to secure a simple majority in the 465-seat chamber. The polls also showed that the party was unable to eke out a majority even in combination with its traditional coalition partner, Komeito, making it likely it would be forced to expand its coalition to retain power. It was also possible that a group of opposition parties could come together to form a government.

Speaking to NHK on Sunday night, Ishiba, looking sombre, said that the Liberal Democrats would have to “try to accept this result” after the “voters have handed down a very harsh vote.”

He said he would consider working with other partners, with an eye on negotiating with parties that “had gained trust from the public” when his own had not.

The question now, 26 days into his tenure, is whether Ishiba will survive as prime minister. If he doesn’t, the country might return to the kind of revolving-door leadership that has characterized Japanese politics in the past.

“We don’t want such trouble again,” said Tsuneo Watanabe, a senior fellow at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation in Tokyo. “But the situation looks likely to go to a very troubled time.”

Early Monday (28), Yoshihiko Noda, a former prime minister and current leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party, the largest opposition party, said in remarks to reporters that he had achieved his goal of denying the Liberal Democrats their majority.

But he held back from giving specifics on his plans for leadership. “The best would be immediate change, but it is becoming more real that it is the eve of change,” Noda said.

Unlike in other countries, where the electorate is divided over ideology and vastly different policy platforms, Japanese voters have been frustrated by a sense that all options were uninspiring and that the governing party had grown complacent.

Both times the Liberal Democrats lost power in the past seven decades, the outcome had been widely predicted. Ever since the party returned to power in 2012 under Shinzo Abe, it has entered elections confident of winning. Now it is possible that the party could lose a majority even in partnership with its traditional coalition ally, Komeito, a political affiliate of Soka Gakkai, a Buddhist sect.

“I didn’t think it would be such a close race,” said Masako Tanaka, 60, a clerical worker at a rally Friday (25) afternoon in Tokyo for a Liberal Democratic lawmaker fighting a tight race against a candidate from the largest opposition party, the Constitutional Democrats.

During campaign rallies, Ishiba, 67, said he felt “the greatest sense of crisis.” His first approval rating after taking office on Oct. 1 was the lowest of any Japanese prime minister at a similar point since 2002, according to a poll conducted by the newspaper Nihon Keizai and TV Tokyo.

Going into the election, the Liberal Democrats still commanded the highest level of support, with just more than 31% of voters endorsing the party in a poll by NHK. The Constitutional Democrats received support from less than 10% of voters surveyed. The largest proportion of voters — 35% — said “There is no political party I particularly support.”

The conditions that the Liberal Democrats faced — or arguably had created — recalled the last two times they lost power. In 1993, voters cast out the party after revelations of corruption and a drastic bursting of a real estate bubble that plunged the economy into recession. Seven disparate opposition parties came together to form a government, but it collapsed within just 11 months.

In 2009, the Democratic Party of Japan won in a landslide victory as voters sought to punish the Liberal Democrats for failing to resuscitate the moribund economy. In both of those instances, the opposition did not present a robust vision for change as much as an opportunity for voters to express their frustration with the long-time governing party.

In August, Fumio Kishida said he would resign as prime minister in an attempt to reset the party’s reputation. Analysts said the party and Ishiba had missed the opportunity to do so.

“I expected Mr. Ishiba would carry out some reforms to get rid of the corrupted image of the LDP,” said Jiro Yamaguchi, a political scientist at Hosei University in Tokyo. But Ishiba, previously viewed as a politician unafraid to shed party shibboleths, backtracked on several of his more prominent campaign promises. “He looked to be co-opted by the old party system,” Yamaguchi said.

During debates before the party leadership election, he had floated plans to push for interest rate increases, capital gains taxes, an Asian version of NATO and the revision of an agreement that governs U.S. military forces based in Japan. He indicated he might support a change in the law requiring that married couples use one surname. On all of these proposals, he has already retreated, evidently bowing to party orthodoxy.

Ishiba also showed an anaemic response to the issue that seemed to bother voters most: political finance scandals. For more than a year, the party has failed to restore voter trust after some Liberal Democratic lawmakers were accused of taking kickbacks from the sale of tickets to political fundraisers.

Although more than 45 politicians were implicated in the scandal, the prime minister announced that the party would withdraw its endorsement from just a dozen candidates. Nine of them are still running, and last week the Japanese news media revealed that the LDP had transferred 20 million yen (about $131,000) to local branches of candidates who had lost the party’s endorsement.

On Sunday, in a central Tokyo district where exit polls indicated an opposition candidate from the Constitutional Democratic Party had defeated a prominent Liberal Democrat, Sukerou Asa, 54, a self-employed technology worker, said that the finance scandal had “quite an impact on my vote this time.”

Although voters had plenty else to be dissatisfied about — including rising food prices, looming demographic pressures from a rapidly ageing population and increasing tensions with North Korea and China — the opposition parties seized on the scandals as their most potent rallying cry. More than emphasizing policy differences, the leaders of the Constitutional Democratic Party talked consistently about the Liberal Democrats’ problem of “politics and money.”

As results were trickling in Sunday night, Masaru Kohno, a political scientist at Waseda University in Tokyo, said that if the governing coalition did not achieve a majority, it might still be difficult for the multiple opposition parties to come together to govern.

Noda might be reluctant to form a multiparty government because if a large coalition collapsed, it would revive memories of a predecessor party’s earlier failures.

Noda said Sunday night that had the opposition had more time, the disparate parties might have better coordinated to avoid overlap of candidates in hotly contested districts. Speaking to NHK, he said that the opposition was “prevented from doing so because the prime minister decided to dissolve the lower house earlier than we expected.”

He added: “So we had to do our best, and within these constraints, we have come to a point where we have gained an outcome where we can be relatively satisfied.”

Ishiba, who represents a rural district in Tottori prefecture, focused on the far-flung and depopulating regions of Japan in his election rhetoric, calling his efforts “Regional Revitalization 2.0”.

While such measures play to his most loyal base, they could alienate urban voters, said Megumi Naoi, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego. “The LDP should be pumping money into the city and talking more about the cities and the hardships of child-rearing voters,” Naoi said.

If the Liberal Democrats indeed fail to capture a majority, they may be forced to invite other coalition partners to help form a government. Such parties would “have a huge bargaining leverage,” said Kohno, allowing them to demand Cabinet positions or the adoption of favoured policies.

-New York Times