JAPAN: Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's risky gamble on his party's political future paid off yesterday after the Japanese electorate handed the ruling Liberal Democrats (LDP) a landslide victory, returning it to power with its largest majority in years.
From an early stage of the count yesterday it looked as if the Liberal Democrats were on course to rule without a coalition partner for the first time since 1990, despite splitting disastrously over Mr Koizumi's plan to privatise Japan Post.
The LDP eventually won 296 seats, while junior coalition partner New Komeito won 31 in parliament's powerful 480-seat lower chamber. Mr. Koizumi had promised to resign if he received "one seat less than" a majority.
The prime minister called the snap election last month after parliament rejected his privatisation bill, expelling 37 rebels in his own party and demanding that the country back his reform plans or choose another leader.
The election was bitterly contested, with the prime minister's opponents, including a number of former LDP colleagues, accusing him of trying to destroy Japan's social fabric with US-style capitalist reforms.
Mr Koizumi called the vote a "referendum on Japan's future". Speaking on Japanese television last night, he said the early results seemed to show he had won "public support my reforms".
Mr Koizumi is now on course to become one of Japan's most influential and longest-serving postwar prime ministers, with a powerful mandate to move ahead with the controversial privatisation plan, which will split up the huge postal network and open up its $3.2-trillion reserves to private investors.
He is now also almost certain to revise the so-called "pacifist constitution", one of the pillars of Japan's postwar political architecture.
The result is a huge setback for the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan, which has slumped disastrously after making steady gains, mainly in urban districts, since its foundation in 1996.
The DPJ began the election with 175 seats and ended with 113, a result which is likely to force the resignation of leader Katsuya Okada.
"It is a very tough result to accept but the people have spoken," Mr Okada said last night.
"But I don't accept that we were wrong to focus on issues other than postal reform."
The prime minister swatted away the DPJ's attempts to debate what it said were far more pressing issues, including a looming pension and health crisis, uncritical support for the US "war on terror" and Japan's worsening relations with its largest trading partner, China.
Mr Okada had promised to resume frozen high-level talks with Beijing and to pull Japanese troops out of Iraq if his party won.
Mr Koizumi's triumph caps the most remarkable episode yet in a four-year political balancing act - reforming Japanese politics as leader of one of the world's most conservative political institutions.
Despite uttering the mantra "reform" thousands of times during 12 days of official stumping, Mr Koizumi was accused of running an intensely conservative campaign.
Just 26 out of 246 candidates fielded by the LDP were women, a gender imbalance more typical of strict Islamic states than the largest political party in the world's second-largest economy.
To make up for the loss of 37 anti-privatisation lawmakers, Mr Koizumi picked high-profile "assassins", including an ex-Miss University of Tokyo and a former TV anchorwoman - a strategy the daily Asahi newspaper called a "classic piece of Koizumi smoke and mirrors politics".
The next two years of Koizumi rule are likely to see the following initiatives:
The passing of legislation authorising the break-up of Japan Post, which boasts $3.2 trillion in insurance deposits and savings.
Further cutbacks on Japan's massive public works spending. Mr Koizumi's supporters claim he will have cut public works by 15 per cent within two years.
The revision of Article 9 of the constitution which "forever renounces war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes".
A visit to the controversial war memorial Yasukuni Shrine on the politically explosive date of August 15th; this was one of the prime minister's key pledges when he was first elected in 2001.