Japan Press Weekly

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2013 April 3 - 9 TOP3 [POLITICS]

JCP calls for proportional representation election system

The Japanese Communist Party on April 3 in a meeting of secretaries general of political parties proposed that the House of Representatives election system be changed to one adopting only the proportional representation system.

Under the current system, 300 of the 480 Lower House seats are chosen from single-seat constituencies and the remaining 180 are from proportional representation blocs.

In a series of lawsuits over vote-value disparity in single-seat constituencies in the 2012 general election, all courts ruled the vote-value disparity as unconstitutional and two courts judged the election results as invalid. Reform of the House of Representatives electoral system is a pressing issue in the political arena.

JCP Secretariat Head Ichida Tadayoshi in the meeting said that all political parties should seriously take into account the judicial decisions which regard the single-seat constituency system as unconstitutional as it fails to guarantee equality in votes.

Ichida stressed that the abolition of the single-seat constituency system is necessary to properly address the vote-value gap between the least and most populous constituencies. He presented the JCP proposal calling for changing the election system to one electing all Lower House members from 11 regional proportional representation blocs without reducing the current number of House members.

Ichida criticized the ruling bloc’s plan to reduce the number of single-seat districts by five for leaving the fundamental problems associated with the single-member system untouched. He also denounced the Democratic Party of Japan’s plan to trim the number of proportional representation seats by 50 as entirely missing the point when the inequality of vote-values in single-seat constituencies has become a hot topic of discussion.