The year of electoral upheaval in Asia

Old-fashioned

As the US presidential election sparks all kinds of debate over the future of the ancient bastion of global democracy, little is known about how bad this year has been for the region's old guard forces closest to Australia.

Sheikh Hasina could have scripted another victory against largely non-competing opposition in Bangladesh in January. But the frustration and resentment this left forced her to abandon the country within seven months.

Candidates associated with Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), the relatively new deposed and imprisoned prime minister, ran as independents in February after the party symbol was excluded from the ballots, but still won by a third seats, embarrassing the military's favorite and once-dominant party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz and the Pakistan People's Party.

In April, South Korean voters made President Yoon Suk-yeol a lame duck in parliamentary elections, with the lowest support for a ruling presidential party in the democratic era.

Despite the growing power of monetary policy, the persistence of dynasties, and social media manipulation in elections, Asian voters have still demonstrated the ability to turn away from establishment politics.

In perhaps the most significant electoral backlash of the year in Asia, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was forced, after the release of election results in June, to govern in coalition for the first time in over of two decades as a state and federal leader, alongside two regional parties with a history of switching sides.

In September, Anur Kumara Dissanayake, a once-obscure former Marxist, snared the Sri Lankan presidency, sidelining various forces in the family establishment, including the Rajapaksas.

And while he doesn't meet the standards of a scrappy outsider, Indonesia's new president, Prabowo Subianto, didn't even mention his predecessor's pet project of a new national capital in his inauguration speech this month this time as he focused on other spending priorities.

Sheikh Hasina arrives at the inauguration ceremony of Narendra Modi in New Delhi on June 9. Two months later, she fled to India after being ousted as prime minister of Bangladesh (Elke Scholiers/Getty Images) Minority man

Shigeru Ishiba has run for Japanese prime minister about five times now as a man of the people or at least a member of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) rather than as a faction leader and pragmatic reformer.

But after leading the seven-decade-old PLD into snap elections days after winning its leadership in September, amid corruption scandals, the collapse of its faction system and general public discontent Faced with cost of living issues and political stagnation, he is now in danger of becoming the country's shortest-term prime minister.

The fall in support for the LDP and its coalition partner Komeito on Sunday means they hold just 215 seats in the Diet's 465 seats, marking only the third loss of majority in the LDP's history after a brief setback in 1993 and three years in opposition afterward. 2009. Meanwhile, the combined opposition parties have a slim majority, although they have virtually no chance of being able to form a viable government coalition.

Australians could pay much more attention to these developments rather than viewing next week's US presidential election as the sole barometer of the state of global democracy.

This means that Ishiba must win the support of one of two relatively new center-right parties, the Japan Innovation Party (JIP) and the Democratic People's Party (DPP). However, they appear reluctant to formally join an LDP government as all opposition parties eye upper house elections next year to reinforce Sunday's rejection of LDP dominance.

As a result, Ishiba appears to be betting that when the Diet meets on November 11, he will be more likely to create a minority LDP government with periodic political support from those two parties than his rival candidates for leadership of the LDP or the main party. opposition, the left-wing Constitutional Democracy Party (CDP).

At the head of the center

The LDP, born from the merger of Japan's Liberal and Democratic parties in 1955 as the country recovered from the Pacific War, has largely functioned as a major party housing many quasi-conservative schools of thought amid opposition more fragmented. over time.

It has actually only been rivaled regionally by Malaysia's United Malays National Organization (UMNO) as an election-winning machine in democratic Asia. And the LDP remains a far more powerful force than UMNO, which has declined rapidly in recent years to become a second-tier party behind Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim's new center-left Alliance of Hope and the National Alliance Malay nationalists. former Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin.

UMNO lost its monopoly on power in 2018 amid ongoing corruption scandals, drawing a parallel to how Japanese voters turned against the LDP this week.

New Japanese prime ministers often quickly lose voter support. Instead of turning to opposition parties, disappointed voters appear to be voting with their feet, with turnout of 53.8 percent this week, the third lowest since the LDP's founding. Malaysian voters, by contrast, turned out about 75 to 80 percent amid their country's partisan upheaval in recent years.

The PLD faced a brief challenge in 1993 from new centrist parties amid the economic upheaval caused by the collapse of the 1980s bubble economy, but quickly recovered.

The big question now is to what extent things have changed.

The official opposition, the CDP, is now led by Yoshihiko Noda, arguably the best of the three prime ministers in the Japanese Democratic Party government from 2009 to 2012. Yurike Koike, a former LDP minister and party leadership aspirant, now an eternal dilettante of the new party, has just been re-elected to the powerful platform of the governor of Tokyo. The populist and idiosyncratic right-wing JIP is the most enthusiastic new party in the past decade, but this election has raised questions about whether it has appeal beyond its base Osaka regional office.

That leaves the new center-right DPP as the sharp end of a shift in Japanese politics, with its pragmatic consumer-oriented policies and appeal to young voters. Its Diet seats have quadrupled to 28, and it now faces difficult choices: provide de facto support for a LDP minority government or play a waiting game for a role. more important in a future government.

A polling station in Banda Aceh on February 14, 2024 (Chaideer Mahyuddin/AFP via Getty Images) No more change?

It is difficult to draw a common thread between the backlash against incumbents in many Asian elections this year, especially given the possible Japanese parallels to 1993 and the new Indonesian president's calls in his inauguration speech for his country now adopts a polite democracy with less bickering. .

The results in countries like Malaysia and Thailand after recent experiments with new alternative political forces, notably the People's Justice Party and the Advancement Party, are also far from reassuring about the depth of change democratic.

But despite the growing power of monetary policy, the persistence of dynasties and the manipulation of social media in elections, Asian voters have still demonstrated the ability to turn away from establishment politics.

Australians could pay much more attention to these developments rather than viewing next week's US presidential election as the sole barometer of the state of global democracy.

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