Roundup: Japanese opposition parties accelerate realignment, eye summer election

Japanese opposition parties accelerated their realignment ahead of the upper house election slated for this summer with the latest move on Tuesday that two major opposition parties here basically agreed to merge in a step to challenge the ruling coalition led by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), the largest opposition party here, and the Japan Innovation Party (JIP) announced Tuesday their plan to form a new party, and, according to their plan, the new party will be established in late March at earliest, said local reports.

The JIP will be dissolved and then will be merged into the DPJ, which will maintain its factions, but the name of the "Democratic Party of Japan" will be changed, according to the JIP's merge proposal, although veteran DPJ lawmakers insisted keeping the DPJ's name.

DPJ executives approved the integration plan during a meeting on Tuesday and the JIP leader Yorihisa Matsuno also revealed the plan to his party. The two parties will discuss the issue when they each hold intraparty talks on Wednesday so as to gain support within their parties respectively, according to Japan's Kyodo News.

If realized, the new party will have 93 seats in the 475-seat lower house, where the ruling coalition grouped Abe's Liberal Democratic Party and the Komeito Party secures 325 seats in the all-powerful chamber, and 64 seats in the upper house. The ruling camp also maintained the majority in the 242-seat chamber.

Half of the 242 seats in the upper house will be elected every three years. According to the poll system, 73 of the 121 seats will be contested in the single- and multiple-member electoral districts and the rest 48 are chosen under the nationwide party-list proportional representation system.

The LDP and its partner of Komeito Party ousted the DPJ from the ruling position in a lower house election in late 2012 through an overwhelming victory and put an end to the twisted parliament by winning an upper house election in 2013.

Having a comfortable parliament, the ruling bloc's "runaway policy" worried the Japanese public, especially after the ruling parties enacted the controversial Special Secrecy Law in 2013 and the security-related laws last year. Both enactments triggered large-scale protests across the island country.

Also on Tuesday, secretaries general of five opposition parties, including the DPJ and JIP, held a meeting to discuss their cooperation such as coordination in filing unified candidates in single-member electoral districts in the coming poll in order to better fight against the ruling camp, according to Kyodo.

The five parties that also include the Japanese Communist Party, the Social Democratic Party and the People's Life Party on Friday filed two bills to the lower house demanding the retraction of the security laws for their unconstitutionality, aiming at refreshing public bitter memory over the ruling camp's arrogance when it rammed the security bills through the parliament and trying to make the issue a focus in the upcoming upper house election.

For the ruling camp, particularly for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the summer's poll is significant to achieve his attempt to launch the Constitution amendment motion if the ruling camp could grab two thirds of seats in the upper house.

Hitting by a string of scandals connected to Abe Cabinet's ministers and lawmakers, the nationwide support rate for the Cabinet tumbled 7 percentage points to 46.7 percent, according to the latest survey released Sunday, while the disapproval rating for the Cabinet stood at 38.9 percent as of this weekend, compared to 35.3 percent as per the poll taken at the end of last month. Endit