Socialists Fall as New Party Is Big Winner in Tokyo Vote

TOKYO — Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa’s Liberal Democratic Party retained its plurality Sunday and the leftist Socialists suffered a debacle in an election for the Tokyo metropolitan assembly.

While the ruling party’s showing was commendable in view of its current troubles, a similar outcome in the July 18 national election would end its one-party control of government.

The big winner was the Japan New Party, founded a year ago by Morihiro Hosokawa, a former Liberal Democratic governor. It won 20 seats--16% of the total--in its first entry into the Tokyo election involving 9.3 million eligible voters, or a quarter of Japan’s total.

Japan’s 38-year-old political domination by the Liberal Democrats as the perennial ruling party with the Socialists as the eternal leader of the opposition at the national level “is collapsing, like the Berlin Wall,” Hosokawa said.

In fact, a protest vote against the Liberal Democrats that four years ago went to the Socialists this time wound up with Hosokawa’s New Party.

The Socialists’ loss of 60% of their gains of four years ago exposed an Achilles’ heel in the opposition’s efforts to end the Liberal Democrats’ control of the government.

The Liberal Democrats now are 29 seats short of a parliamentary majority. But if the Socialists drop as much in the July national election for the lower house of Parliament as they did in the Tokyo assembly voting Sunday, more than 80 parliamentary seats now held by Socialists would go to other parties.

The chairman and the secretary general of the Socialists’ Tokyo chapter were defeated and the party lost its standing as the second-largest group in the Tokyo assembly, falling to fourth with 14 seats. The Buddhist-backed Komei (Clean Government) Party finished second with 25. With all but two of its candidates winning, Hosokawa’s group took third place.

Tokyo’s conservative governor rules with a Liberal Democrat-led coalition in the 128-member assembly.

The election, in which campaigning focused on change in national politics, was regarded as a harbinger of the lower-house ballot in July. In 1989, three weeks after a humiliating defeat in the Tokyo assembly election, the Liberal Democrats lost control of the upper house of Parliament for the first time ever.

Two new parties established this month by Liberal Democrat defectors did not participate in the Tokyo election.

The ruling party’s showing--a gain of one seat--was a surprise, coming as it did in the midst of a wave of condemnation of Miyazawa and the Liberal Democrats for quashing three months of efforts to enact political reform.

An opposition motion of no-confidence against Miyazawa, which passed with the support of ruling party rebels, left the prime minister so disgraced that the party’s Tokyo chapter demanded that he stay out of the campaigning.

Seiroku Kajiyama, secretary general of the party, said the results were “a manifestation of distrust against all established parties, especially against the Liberal Democratic Party and the Socialists. Voters were fed up with anything old--whether it be good or bad.”

Miyazawa, nonetheless, issued a statement praising party officials for “putting up a good fight.”