page_title: 2005 Japanese general election
section_title: Polls and results
hierarchical_section_title: 2005 Japanese general election / Polls and results
caption_attribution_description: English: Seat map of the results of the Japanese Election of 2005, created using Slashme's parliamentary seat results creator tool. &#160;&#160; LDP (296) &#160;&#160; DPJ (113) &#160;&#160; Kōmeitō (31) &#160;&#160; Independents (18) &#160;&#160; JCP (9) &#160;&#160; SDP (7) &#160;&#160; PNP(4) &#160;&#160; NPN(1) &#160;&#160; NPD(1)
context_page_description: A general election in Japan was held on 11 September 2005 for all 480 seats of the House of Representatives of Japan, the lower house of the Diet of Japan, almost two years before the end of the term taken from the last election in 2003. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi called the election after bills to privatize Japan Post were voted down in the upper house, despite strong opposition within his own Liberal Democratic Party.
  The election handed a landslide victory to Koizumi's LDP, with the party winning 296 seats, the largest share in postwar politics. With its partner, New Komeito, the governing coalition then commanded a two-thirds majority in the lower house, allowing them to pass legislative bills over the objections of the upper house and to approve amendments to the Constitution, then submit them to the upper house and a national referendum.
  The opposition Democratic Party, which advocated a change of government during campaign, suffered a devastating loss, winning only 113 seats against 175 seats it held going into the election.
context_section_description: Pre-election polls had been consistently showing the LDP's solid lead, especially among independent voters in urban areas like Tokyo and other big cities nationwide where its main opposition the DPJ had had a main support base. Newspaper surveys predicted a big victory for the LDP, which could lead the DPJ, young and short on unity, to disintegrate. Election analysts, however, warned that few LDP candidates were enjoying comfortable leads, and there was still a large number of undecided voters who went for the DPJ in the last election, thus the election results were far from being set.
  The actual election results closely matched what the pre-election polls, which experts believed were unlikely to materialize, had predicted. Election results gave the governing coalition 327 seats, more than a two-thirds majority in the lower house. In general, the LDP roughly held its own in rural areas, retaking about half the seats held by rebels, but holding steady or even falling slightly against other parties. On the other hand, in urban areas the LDP had a devastating victory, reducing the DPJ from twelve single member constituencies to one in Tokyo, from nine to two in Osaka and from eight to zero in Kanagawa. The so-called 'assassin' candidates recruited by the LDP to stand against the disendorsed party rebels met with mixed success. Although 20 were elected, only 9 of these managed to defeat rebels in single-seat constituencies, with the remaining 11 elected by proportional representation. 5 'assassins' failed to be elected. Another casualty was the prominent independent candidate Takafumi Horie who was defeated by the LDP rebel Shizuka Kamei, now representing the People's New Party.
  One of the biggest landslides in Japanese politics came as a great surprise to virtually everyone, from politicians in both government and opposition camps to political analysts and the general public to finally Junichiro Koizumi himself, who reiterated after the election that he just asked for a majority. In particular the DPJ's catastrophic defeats in the capital area (namely Tokyo and Kanagawa) shocked the party's members with no clear strategy to reverse the trends in future elections, as well as the LDP leadership who were now concerned that the LDP might have won such a great victory that it could lead to a swing against the party in the future. Analysis of the votes shows that the degree to which the electorate shifted their votes from the LDP to the DPJ was not as considerable as the number of seats exchanged; the LDP won 47.8% of the total votes, up from 43.8%, while the DPJ collected the same percentage (36.4%) as it did in the last lower-house election two years ago. Indeed, New Kōmeitō even lost three seats despite winning more votes than ever. Political analysts attribute this discrepancy to, in addition to the historically high turnout (67.5%), the switch of the election system a decade ago from the traditional medium-sized constituency system to today's system that combines single-seat constituencies and multi-member constituencies elected by proportional representation. The irony is that it was Koizumi who was a vocal critic of the switch and the likes of Okada and Ichirō Ozawa, the DPJ's deputy leader, who departed from the LDP to have made the switch in a bid to create the two-party system.
  The national summary of votes and seats by party follow:
caption: Japanese House of Representatives composition following the election.
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