TOKYO: Voters in Tokyo knocked Japan’s ruling party from its position as the largest group in the city assembly, results showed Monday, a warning sign for Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s unpopular government before July elections.
Japanese media said it was a record-low result in the key local ballot for the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has led the country almost continuously since 1955.
Public support for Ishiba, who took office in October, has been at rock-bottom for months, partly because of high inflation, with rice prices doubling over the past year.
The LDP took 21 Tokyo assembly seats in Sunday’s vote, including three won by candidates previously affiliated with the party but not officially endorsed following a political funding scandal.
This breaks the party’s previous record low of 23 seats from 2017, according to the Asahi Shimbun and other local media.
Ishiba described the results as a “very harsh judgment.”
“We will study what part of our campaign pledge failed to resonate with voters and ensure we learn from this,” he told reporters on Monday.
Tomin First no Kai, founded by Tokyo governor Yuriko Koike, increased its seats in the 127-member assembly to 31, becoming the largest party.
The funding scandal “may have affected” the result, Shinji Inoue, head of the LDP’s Tokyo chapter, said Sunday as exit polls were released.
Policies to address inflation “didn’t reach voters’ ears very well” with opposition parties also pledging to tackle the issue, Inoue said.


Within weeks Ishiba will face elections for parliament’s upper house, with reports saying the national ballot could be held on July 20.
Voters angry with rising prices and political scandals deprived Ishiba’s LDP and its junior coalition partner of a majority in the powerful lower house in October, marking the party’s worst general election result in 15 years.
Polls this month showed a slight uptick in support, however, thanks in part to policies to tackle high rice prices.
Several factors lie behind recent shortages of rice at Japanese shops, including an intensely hot and dry summer two years ago that damaged harvests nationwide, and panic-buying after a “mega-quake” warning last year.
Some traders have been hoarding rice in a bid to boost their profits down the line, experts say.
Not including volatile fresh food, goods and energy in Japan were 3.7 percent higher in May than a year earlier.
To help households combat the cost of living, Ishiba has pledged cash handouts of 20,000 yen ($139) for every citizen ahead of the upper house election.


Masahisa Endo, a politics professor at Waseda University, described the Tokyo assembly result as “severe” for the ruling party.
“Tokyo is not a stronghold for the LDP, but it’s possible that its support is weakening across the nation,” he said.
Even if Ishiba fails to win an upper-house majority, it is hard to see who would want to take his place, while Japan’s opposition parties are too divided to mount a credible challenge to the LDP’s power, Endo told AFP.
The opposition Democratic Party For the People (DPP) won seats for the first time in the Tokyo assembly vote, securing nine.
The DPP’s campaign pledge for the July election includes sales tax cuts to boost household incomes.
Sunday’s voter turnout rate was 47.6 percent, compared to the 42.4 percent four years ago, according to local media.
A record 295 candidates ran — the highest since 1997, including 99 women candidates, also a record high.
The number of women assembly members rose to 45 from 41, results showed.

NEWARK: A Palestinian activist who was detained for more than three months pushed his infant son’s stroller with one hand and cheered as he was welcomed home Saturday by supporters including US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Mahmoud Khalil greeted friends and spoke briefly to reporters at New Jersey’s Newark International Airport a day after leaving a federal immigration facility in Louisiana. A former Columbia University graduate student and symbol of President Donald Trump ‘s clampdown on campus protests, he vowed to continue protesting Israel and the war in Gaza.
“The US government is funding this genocide, and Columbia University is investing in this genocide,” he said. “This is why I will continue to protest with every one of you. Not only if they threaten me with detention. Even if they would kill me, I would still speak up for Palestine.”
Joining Khalil at the airport, Ocasio-Cortez said his detention violated the First Amendment and was “an affront to every American.”
“He has been accused, baselessly, of horrific allegations simply because the Trump administration and our overall establishment disagrees with his political speech,” she said.
“The Trump administration knows that they are waging a losing legal battle,” Ocasio-Cortez added. “They are violating the law, and they know that they are violating the law.”
Khalil, a 30-year-old legal resident whose wife gave birth during his 104 days of detention, said he also will speak up for the immigrants he left behind in the detention center.
“Whether you are a citizen, an immigrant, anyone in this land, you’re not illegal. That doesn’t make you less of a human,” he said.
Khalil was not accused of breaking any laws during the protests at Columbia. However the administration has said noncitizens who participate in such demonstrations should be expelled from the country for expressing views it considers to be antisemitic and “pro-Hamas,” referring to the Palestinian militant group that attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Khalil was released after US District Judge Michael Farbiarz said it would be “highly, highly unusual” for the government to continue detaining a legal resident who was unlikely to flee and had not been accused of any violence. The government filed notice Friday evening that it was appealing Khalil’s release.