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The unconstitutionality of elections in Japan have once again come to the fore as a consortium of lawyers plans to nullify the results of the July 21 Upper House election, local media reported Wednesday.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Liberal Democratic Party ( LDP) and their New Komeito ally are widely believed to be a shoe- in for garnering the majority of the 122 seats up for grabs in the smaller 242-seat upper chamber of the Diet in the July 21 election.
The LDP already has 50 seats in the upper house that will go uncontested, while their ally New Komeito has nine, giving them a total of 59. They will jointly need to win just 63 seats in the upcoming election to gain a majority.
The win would give Abe and his ruling LDP control over both houses and the autonomy to enact legislation far quicker than in the past, as Japan's bicameral system of parliament has for decades been divided, making for prolonged logjam in the process of ratifying new bills.
However, as the LDP sets about its nationwide election campaign with its confident leader waxing lyrical about bringing an end to a "twisted parliament" and rescuing the nation from its economic malaise with his "Abenomics" mantra -- once his party wins the election -- veteran lawyer Hidetoshi Masunaga, 70, has other ideas.
Matsunaga, an outspoken lawyer who for many years has campaigned to change Japan's dubious electoral system, has commandeered the support and services of plaintiffs spanning the entire 47 prefectural electoral districts across the country for lawsuits, with the singular aim of invalidating the results of the upper house election on July 21.
“If we file lawsuits for all electoral districts, judges will feel compelled to issue rulings to call the results unconstitutional and invalid," Matsunaga said at a news conference in Tokyo.
"Japan today is not a real democracy because its elections are not fair," the heavyweight lawyer was quoted as saying in a recent editorial on the matter.
According to Matsunaga's group, despite having battled for electoral change for a number of years, with relative successes relating to lower house elections -- with two major courts ruling that the election results were either invalid or unconstitutional - - this will mark the first time the group will attempt to invalidate the results in all 47 electoral districts in a national election.
Buoying Matsunaga's efforts, in 2011 the Supreme Court here said the electoral map for the lower house of the Diet was in a " state of unconstitutionality" due to it "disenfranchising" the electorate.
However, the 2012 general election went ahead regardless, with Abe stating he would reform the system once he was in office -- a pledge yet to come anywhere close tofruition, political analysts have noted.
"In the past 60 years the Supreme Court has never overturned an election result because of voting disparity," political commentator and expert on the matter, Philip McNeil told Xinhua.
"Abe is hedging his bets that this time will be no different and he will be able to successfully seize and keep control of both houses, even if there's a post-election backlash from the electorate on the matter," McNeil added.
With voting disparities here widely known to have adversely and unfairly affected political results since the 1960s, Matsunaga is hoping that now is the time for change as minor shifts towards rebalancing the disparity have been made.
Lawmakers here last November agreed to change the law allowing the numbers of parliamentary seats among districts to be altered to reduce disparity in the numbers of voters per lawmaker.
Prior to this, on a nationwide basis, the worst disparity was a ratio of five in the 2010 upper house election -- between Tottori Prefecture, the least populated electoral district per lawmaker, and Kanagawa Prefecture, the most populated.
But while the Supreme Court declared that the ratio reflects " the state of being unconstitutional," no further moves were made by Japan's top court on the matter.
Currently, the largest disparity is between Tottori Prefecture, the least and Hokkaido Prefecture, the most.
"Matsunaga's group has pointed out that after the coming election for the upper house on July 21, rural Tottori will have two councillors in the house to represent some 500,000 of its voters, while Hyogo Prefecture in the Kansai region will have only four," McNeil said.
"This in spite of being home to the huge city of Kobe and having more than nine times as many voters. It is a well-known fact that the LDP relies heavily on its rural support base and aggressively readdressing the disparity could essentially weaken the ruling party's grip on power," he said.
Matsunaga maintains however that public perception about the issue is changing and party's like the LDP can no longer hide behind arcane electoral systems, not fully understood by the public, and has took it upon himself to be vocal on the issue and disseminate the unconstitutionality of the matter clearly to the masses.
"I expect the Supreme Court to issue a ruling invalidating an election as early as next spring." Matsunaga said of the matter.
The lawsuits will be filed on July 22, one day after the upper house election, with the country's 14 high courts.
