TOKYO — Japanese voters cast ballots today in a parliamentary election that is viewed as a test of confidence in the ruling Democrats’ 10 months in power.
Polls show that Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s party will likely lose seats in the 242-member upper house, where half the seats are up for grabs. That is partly because he has suggested that Japan needs to raise its sales tax in coming years as the country’s population ages and shrinks.
The vote won’t directly affect the ruling Democratic Party of Japan’s grip on power because it has a majority in the more powerful lower house. But a weak showing will undermine its ability to pass legislation and force it to find new coalition partners.
Kan’s Democrats swept to power in August, ending 55 years of nearly unbroken rule by the conservatives, promising to slash wasteful spending, rein in the bureaucrats’ power and bring more transparency to politics.
In their brief tenure so far, the Democrats have delivered mixed results.
They have put the brakes on many large public works projects considered wasteful. But their first prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, disappointed voters by breaking a campaign pledge to move a U.S. Marine base off the island of Okinawa and by getting mixed up in a funding scandal.
Kan, a plain-spoken former finance minister with a grassroots activist background, enjoyed an initial surge in approval ratings when he came to office just a month ago after Hatoyama quit.
Kan has argued that Japan needs to take aggressive steps to tackle its ballooning public debt. If it doesn’t, he has warned that the world’s No. 2 economy could face a Greece-like fiscal crisis — a comparison that experts say is a stretch because most government bonds are held by domestic investors unlikely to dump the securities.
But his suggestion that Japan should consider raising its sales tax from 5 percent to as high as 10 percent in coming years has dragged down his support ratings, possibly hurting his party’s chances in the election.
Over the past several days, Kan has toned down his tax talk, promising that the Democrats won’t raise the sales tax until after the next lower house elections, scheduled for three years from now.
Kan has set a target of winning 54 of the seats at stake, the same number as the Democrats have now.
