Ishiba faces bad poll numbers with Upper House vote only days away
An NHK poll released Monday showed Ishiba's approval rating at 31% compared to a June poll of 39%. Support for the LDP stood at 24%, down from 31.6% last month.
If the ruling coalition — the LDP and its junior partner Komeito — loses its Upper House majority, Ishiba would face internal party pressure to resign and kickstart discussions on whether the two-party minority government can convince an opposition party to join it. The ruling coalition also lost its majority in the more powerful Lower House last October.
Polls conducted by the Yomiuri Shimbun and Nikkei showed the LDP and Komeito may end up with less than the 50 seats they need to maintain a majority, with the situation only getting worse with time.
The Yomiuri poll, conducted from Saturday to Tuesday, showed that, of the 32 constituencies with one seat up for grabs, the LDP is ahead in only four, down from seven in an earlier poll.
The party is expected to do better in districts with two or more seats contested. But candidates from the small right-leaning Sanseito party are pulling some conservative votes with their 'Japanese First' rhetoric — votes that may have otherwise gone to the LDP.
The Nikkei poll, conducted from Sunday to Tuesday, meanwhile, also showed the LDP and Komeito were struggling more now than at the beginning of the campaign and that they are in danger of falling short of the necessary 50 seats.
The LDP had a strong chance of winning in only five of the 32 constituencies with one seat contested, and is facing tough battles in 13 districts with multiple seats up for grabs, including Hokkaido, Saitama, Aichi and Fukuoka. For proportional representation seats, the poll showed the party could win less than the 18 seats it won in the previous 2022 Upper House election.
Komeito, in which 14 members are facing re-election, also received bad news in both polls, with the Yomiuri poll saying the party could finish with around nine seats, and the Nikkei poll indicating it could win less than 10 seats.
The Yomiuri poll, which got responses from about 140,000 people, was a mixture of an internet survey, conducted in collaboration with Line Yahoo, and a separate automated voice telephone survey conducted in collaboration with Nikkei. Nikkei's poll covered some 51,400 people. The papers independently compiled and analyzed the data.
As for the NHK poll, conducted for three days through Sunday, the Ishiba Cabinet's disapproval rate stood at 53%, up from 50% two weeks ago, for reasons the survey did not offer.
Should the LDP and Komeito lose their majority, one option for them would be to convince an opposition party to join the ruling coalition — an extremely difficult process but one that could, on paper, mean a majority of votes in parliament.
Though no opposition party has expressed formal interest in joining the LDP and Komeito after the election, an Asahi Shimbun survey of 490 Upper House election candidates showed that 63% of LDP candidates said a tie-up with the Democratic Party for the People was possible, while 53% said the same for Nippon Ishin no Kai.
But 84% said joining forces with the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, the largest opposition force, was 'unthinkable.'
The survey, released on July 10, was conducted jointly with the research lab of Masaki Taniguchi, a professor of Japanese politics at the University of Tokyo, between the end of May and the beginning of July.
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