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.

BOGOTA: More than 50 Colombian soldiers were being held captive Sunday by residents of a guerrilla-controlled region in the southwest of the country, the army said.
A first platoon of soldiers was carrying out an operation in El Tambo, a municipality part of an area known as the Micay Canyon — a cocaine-producing enclave — when civilians detained them on Saturday.
On Sunday another group of soldiers was surrounded by at least 200 residents as they headed toward El Plateado, another town in the region.
“As a result of both events, a total of four non-commissioned officers and 53 professional soldiers remain deprived of their liberty,” the army said.
In conflict-ridden regions of Colombia, some illegal groups at times order civilians to carry out actions to impede the advance of security forces. They are usually released hours later after the intervention of human rights organizations.
General Federico Alberto Mejia said in a video that it was a “kidnapping” by guerrillas who had “infiltrated” the community.
The army has maintained that the farmers receive orders from the so-called Central General Staff (EMC), the main FARC dissident group that did not sign the 2016 peace agreement with the then government.
President Gustavo Petro on Sunday urged farmers to “stop believing in armed groups who obey foreigners,” referring to the guerrillas’ alleged ties to Mexican cartels.
“We want to spread peace, but freeing the soldiers, who are their own children, is imperative,” the leftist president wrote on social media platform X.
Petro has been trying for months to ensure that the Armed Forces gain access to the entire Micay Canyon.
In March, 28 police officers and a soldier were held captive by local residents in the same area. All were released two days later.
Colombia is experiencing its worst security crisis in the last decade. Petro attempted to negotiate peace with the EMC, but its main leader, known as “Ivan Mordisco,” abandoned the talks.