JAPAN ELECTION RESULTS IN SMALLEST MAIN OPPOSITION PARTY IN POSTWAR ERA

TOKYO, Feb 10 (Bernama-Kyodo) -- The Centrist Reform Alliance secured just 49 seats in Sunday's House of Representatives election, the lowest total for a main opposition party in Japan in the postwar era, Kyodo News reported.

Following the election, the party, formed in January by bringing together the lower house members of the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan and the Komeito party, lacks the requisite strength to submit budget-related bills or a no-confidence motion against the Cabinet.

The alliance, whose seat count fell from 167, won nearly half as many votes as Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's Liberal Democratic Party across single-seat districts and proportional representation blocks, but it ended up with only around a sixth of the LDP's 316 seats, up from 198 before the election.

Opposition parties now hold a combined 109 seats in the 465-member lower house, with the Japan Innovation Party, the LDP's coalition partner, accounting for 36 seats and independents four.

In previous lower house elections in which a single party secured a landslide victory, the CDPJ's predecessor, the Democratic Party of Japan, won 308 seats in 2009, while the LDP became the main opposition party with 119.

Prior to 1996, the electoral system featured multi-member districts with varying seat counts. In 1986, when the LDP won 300 seats, the main opposition, the Japan Socialist Party, held just 85.

When the LDP returned to power in 2012 with 294 seats, the main opposition DPJ was left with 57, while in 2017, the LDP won 281 seats and the main opposition CDPJ ended with 54.

-- BERNAMA-KYODO