By Elaine Lies
TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan’s ruling party is set to lose at least two of three seats in parliamentary by-elections widely seen as a verdict on Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and bellwether of national elections later this year, exit polls predicted on Sunday.
The votes, for seats in both the Upper House and the more powerful lower chamber, are the first significant ballots since Suga took power last September. They will fill two seats left open due to scandals and one because of the lawmaker’s death from COVID-19, and could affect the timing of Lower House elections that must be held by October.
Suga had support around 70 percent when he took office by replacing Shinzo Abe, who resigned due to health reasons after becoming Japan’s longest-serving premier. But a series of scandals and criticism of his handling of the pandemic – including a torturously slow vaccine rollout – sent his ratings plunging to the low 30 percent level before recovering slightly.
Opposition candidates were set to win two of the three seats – one where Suga’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) had not even fielded a candidate – and another was ahead in the third as of 9.00 p.m. local time (1200 GMT), according to exit polls conducted by NHK public television.
Though the LDP had been expected to lose the seat in central Nagano Prefecture, held by an opposition politician prior to his death late last year, a loss in conservative Hiroshima prefecture would be a blow that could affect Suga’s own fate by weakening support for him in the LDP.
The Hiroshima seat became vacant when lawmaker Anri Kawai, the wife of a former justice minister who has long had close ties to Suga, was found guilty of vote buying.
The LDP did not field a candidate in the final election, on the northern island of Hokkaido, for a district whose lawmaker, a former agriculture minister, quit over a bribery scandal.
(Reporting by Elaine Lies; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)
