Liberal Democratic Party (Japan)
Based on Wikipedia: Liberal Democratic Party (Japan)
For nearly seventy years, one party has dominated Japanese politics so completely that losing an election feels like a constitutional crisis. The Liberal Democratic Party—known in Japan simply as Jimintō—has governed the world's fourth-largest economy almost without interruption since 1955. To put that in perspective: the party has been in power longer than most democracies have existed.
That unbroken reign finally cracked in late 2024.
The Birth of Permanent Government
The Liberal Democratic Party wasn't founded on ideology. It was founded on fear. In 1955, Japan's socialists were gaining momentum, and the country's fractured conservative parties realized they needed to unite or face extinction. Two rivals—the Liberal Party and the Japan Democratic Party—merged into a single entity designed to do one thing: keep the left out of power.
It worked spectacularly well.
From its first election victory in 1955, the party established what political scientists call the "1955 System"—a framework where the LDP governed continuously while the Socialist Party served as permanent opposition. This wasn't democracy as Americans or Europeans understood it. It was something closer to a managed competition, where power changed hands within the ruling party through factional maneuvering rather than between parties through elections.
The system had an unlikely benefactor: the United States Central Intelligence Agency. Throughout the 1950s and into the early 1970s, the CIA funneled millions of dollars to support the LDP against leftist parties. This remained classified until The New York Times exposed the operation in the mid-1990s. Available documents show connections to prime ministers from the powerful Satō-Kishi-Abe family—a political dynasty whose influence would echo through Japanese politics for generations.
Engineering an Economic Miracle
Whatever its origins, the LDP delivered results that few could argue with. Under Prime Minister Eisaku Satō, who led Japan through most of the 1960s, the country transformed from a war-devastated nation into an industrial powerhouse. Tokyo hosted the 1964 Summer Olympics—a coming-out party that announced Japan's return to the world stage.
The party developed an unusual governing philosophy. It had no coherent ideology to speak of. Instead, it functioned as what one analyst called "a locus for matching interest group money and votes with bureaucratic power and expertise." Big business, small business, farmers, and professionals all found their place within the LDP coalition. Elite bureaucrats drafted policy in collaboration with party leaders. Everyone got something.
This arrangement produced corruption—inevitable, perhaps, given the cozy relationships between government and industry. But it also produced stability and growth that seemed to justify the trade-offs. By the 1980s, Japanese manufacturing threatened American dominance. Japanese banks became the largest in the world. Economists predicted Japan would overtake the United States as the world's leading economy.
They were wrong.
The Bubble Bursts
The Japanese asset price bubble—an extraordinary inflation in real estate and stock prices during the late 1980s—collapsed spectacularly in 1991. Property values that had grown to absurd heights (at one point, the Imperial Palace grounds were theoretically worth more than all the real estate in California) crashed back to earth. Banks that had lent freely against inflated collateral found themselves drowning in bad debt.
The LDP's reputation for economic competence crashed along with property prices. Scandals that might have been overlooked during boom times now seemed unforgivable. The Recruit scandal of the late 1980s—a bribery scheme involving inside stock tips—had already tarnished the party's image. When Prime Minister Sōsuke Uno's extramarital affairs became public, voters punished the party in the 1989 upper house elections, costing them their majority for the first time in 34 years.
By 1993, the system that had governed Japan for nearly four decades finally broke. Reformers within the LDP, frustrated by the party's resistance to change, defected to form new parties. In July's general election, the LDP lost its majority. A coalition of seven opposition parties formed a government under Morihiro Hosokawa—himself an LDP defector—ending the 1955 System.
Or so it seemed.
The Art of Political Survival
Here's where Japanese politics gets interesting—and confusing for outside observers. The LDP lost power in 1993, but it remained by far the largest single party, holding over 200 seats while no rival crossed 80. Within a year, the party had engineered one of the most remarkable comebacks in democratic history.
The method was audacious. The LDP formed an alliance with its sworn enemy: the Japan Socialist Party. The same socialists the party had been created to oppose, the same left-wing movement the CIA had spent millions to undermine, became the LDP's coalition partner. The price? The socialists got the prime minister's chair. From 1994 to 1996, Socialist Tomiichi Murayama served as prime minister of a government dominated by the LDP.
By 1996, the LDP's Ryutaro Hashimoto had taken over as prime minister. Through strategic defections from other parties, the LDP rebuilt its majority within a year. The great crisis of Japanese politics had produced little actual change.
The Koizumi Revolution That Wasn't
The early 2000s brought Junichiro Koizumi, perhaps the most genuinely popular leader the LDP had produced in decades. With his wild hair and confrontational style, Koizumi promised to reform the party and break its iron triangles of corruption. He privatized Japan's postal system—an enormous financial institution that had served as a slush fund for LDP politicians—and briefly made reform seem possible.
But Koizumi's revolution proved superficial. The party's fundamental structure remained intact: the factions, the money politics, the cozy relationships with business. When Koizumi stepped down in 2006, his successors quickly reverted to traditional LDP behavior. Prime ministers rotated through office with alarming speed—three in three years—each unable to address Japan's stagnating economy or aging society.
In 2009, Japanese voters finally lost patience. The Democratic Party of Japan—a center-left coalition that had formed from various LDP defectors and opposition groups—won a landslide victory. The LDP collapsed to just 118 seats, its worst defeat ever. For only the second time since 1955, and the first time through a genuine electoral mandate, Japan would be governed by someone other than the LDP.
The Abe Era
The Democratic Party's government lasted three years and produced three prime ministers. It struggled with a devastating earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in 2011. By 2012, voters were ready to return to the familiar.
Shinzo Abe—grandson of former prime minister Nobusuke Kishi (one of the politicians who had benefited from CIA funding in the 1950s)—led the LDP back to power in a landslide. Abe would become Japan's longest-serving prime minister, holding office until 2020. His economic program, dubbed "Abenomics," combined monetary expansion, fiscal stimulus, and promised structural reforms. The first two arrived; the third proved elusive.
Abe pursued an ambitious nationalist agenda. He pushed to revise Article 9 of the Japanese constitution—the famous "peace clause" that renounces war and limits Japan's military to self-defense. In 2015, his government reinterpreted the clause to allow Japan's Self-Defense Forces to fight alongside allies in certain circumstances. For Abe, this wasn't militarism but realism: China's rise demanded that Japan take more responsibility for regional security.
On July 8, 2022, nearly two years after stepping down as prime minister, Abe was assassinated while giving a campaign speech. The killer's stated motive: Abe's connections to the Unification Church, a controversial religious movement with extensive ties to LDP politicians. The assassination exposed just how deeply the church had embedded itself in Japanese conservative politics, damaging the party's reputation even as the nation mourned its longest-serving leader.
A Party Without a Philosophy
To understand the LDP, you need to abandon the assumption that political parties are defined by ideology. The LDP is better understood as a coalition of factions—essentially parties within a party—that cooperate to hold power while competing fiercely for leadership positions and resources.
These factions have their own leaders, their own headquarters, their own fundraising operations. When journalists describe the LDP as a "big tent" party ranging from "moderately conservative to far-right and ultraconservative," they're really describing different factions that coexist under the same umbrella. One faction might emphasize economic liberalism and close ties with the United States. Another might focus on traditional values and historical revisionism. A third might prioritize rural interests and agricultural subsidies.
This structure explains both the party's remarkable durability and its resistance to reform. Factions provide career ladders and mutual support for ambitious politicians. They also make it nearly impossible to purge corrupt elements or enforce ideological discipline. When one faction's scandals threaten the party, other factions can distance themselves while still benefiting from continued LDP rule.
The system worked well enough when the economy was growing and voters were satisfied. It began to crack under the pressure of prolonged stagnation and increasingly brazen corruption.
The 2024 Reckoning
In November 2023, Japanese media exposed what became known as the slush fund scandal. Members of LDP factions had been raising money at party events and funneling millions of yen—over 600 million in total—into secret accounts, violating campaign finance laws. The scandal implicated 82 lawmakers from both houses of parliament, including factions associated with the late Shinzo Abe and sitting Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
Three major factions announced they would dissolve entirely. Several lawmakers were indicted. Kishida's approval ratings collapsed. In August 2024, he announced his resignation. His successor, Shigeru Ishiba, called a snap election in September, hoping to secure a fresh mandate.
The gamble backfired spectacularly.
In the October 2024 general election, the LDP and its coalition partner Komeito lost their parliamentary majority for the first time since 2009. The LDP secured only 191 seats—its second-worst result in history. The Constitutional Democratic Party, led by former Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, nearly doubled its seat count. For the first time since 1955, no single party held 200 seats in the lower house.
The upper house followed in 2025. For the first time in the LDP's history, the party controlled neither chamber of parliament.
Japan's First Female Prime Minister
After Ishiba announced his resignation, the LDP turned to Sanae Takaichi—a conservative known for her hawkish positions on China and her visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japan's war dead including convicted war criminals. In October 2025, she became the first woman to lead the party.
Her elevation came at a cost. Komeito, the Buddhist-affiliated party that had been the LDP's coalition partner since 1999, broke with Takaichi over policy disagreements. The party that had governed Japan for seven decades suddenly found itself alone.
Takaichi negotiated a confidence-and-supply agreement with the Japan Innovation Party, a reformist opposition party based in Osaka. On October 21, 2025, she became Japan's first female prime minister—not through electoral triumph but through parliamentary arithmetic and factional maneuvering, in the time-honored LDP tradition.
The Permanent Government Faces Mortality
The Liberal Democratic Party has defied predictions of its demise before. It survived the bubble's collapse, the brief exile of the 1990s, the landslide defeat of 2009. Each time, it returned to power within a few years, its fundamental structure intact.
But the 2024-2025 crisis feels different. The slush fund scandal wasn't an isolated incident but evidence of systemic rot. The faction system that once provided stability has become a vehicle for corruption. The party's traditional supporters—rural voters, small business owners, seniors—are aging and shrinking as a share of the electorate. Young Japanese voters, facing decades of economic stagnation and mounting national debt, show little of their parents' reflexive loyalty to the LDP.
Most significantly, the party that was created to prevent the left from taking power now faces opposition from the right. The Japan Innovation Party, the LDP's new partner, runs on a platform of government reform that implicitly criticizes LDP governance. If Takaichi's government stumbles, voters may decide that change is finally possible—not through the center-left parties that have failed before, but through reformers who promise to fix what the LDP broke.
The 1955 System depended on the idea that there was no alternative to LDP rule. After seventy years, Japanese voters may finally be willing to test that proposition.
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