Liberal Democrats Win Landslide Victory in Japan Elections

TOKYO — Japan’s voters handed a landslide victory to the Liberal Democratic Party in parliamentary elections on Sunday, giving power back to the conservative party that had governed Japan for decades until a historic defeat three years ago.

In a chaotic election crowded with new parties making sweeping promises, from abolishing nuclear power after the disaster at Fukushima to creating an American-style federal system, the Liberal Democrats prevailed with their less radical vision of reviving the recession-bound economy and standing up to an increasingly assertive China. The win was a dramatic comeback for the party that built postwar Japan, but was ejected from power in 2009 after failing to end two decades of social and economic stagnation.

A victory all but ensures that the Liberal Democratic leader, Shinzo Abe, a former prime minister who is one Japan’s most outspoken nationalists, will be able to form a government with himself as prime minister.

However, many Japanese saw Sunday’s vote not as a weakening of Japan’s desire for change, or a swing to the anti-Chinese right, but as a rebuke of the incumbent Democrats, who had swept aside the Liberal Democrats with bold vows to overhaul Japan’s sclerotic postwar order, only to disappoint voters by failing to deliver. Mr. Abe acknowledged as much, saying that his party had simply ridden a wave of public disgust in the failures of his opponents.

“We recognize that this was not a restoration of confidence in the Liberal Democratic Party, but a rejection of three years of incompetent rule by the Democratic Party,” Mr. Abe told reporters on Sunday.

In the powerful lower house, the Liberal Democrats held a commanding lead, winning 266 of the 400 seats that had been decided. NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster, was forecasting that the Liberal Democrats could win more than 300 of the 480 seats up for grabs, which would almost mirror the results in 2009, when the Democrats won 308 seats. The Democrats won only 44 of the seats that had been decided, putting them in a dead heat for a distant second place with the news Japan Restoration Party, which was started by Osaka’s popular mayor. It was a crushing defeat for a party whose victory three years ago was heralded as the start of a vigorous two-party democracy.

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda resigned as head of the Democratic Party to take responsibility for the loss, despite holding onto to his own seat in Chiba, outside Tokyo.

“We failed to meet the people’s hopes after the change of government three years and four months ago,” Mr. Noda told reporters.

In a sign of how far the pendulum had swung against the incumbents, former Prime Minister Naoto Kan was fighting to keep his seat from an unknown Liberal Democratic challenger in a contest that remained too close to call. Other prominent members also lost their seats in what was increasingly looking like a rout.

“We tried the Democratic Party for three years, and it was a total disaster,” said Hideyuki Takizawa, a 52-year-old stockbroker at a polling station in the Tokyo suburb of Kawagoe. Mr. Takizawa said he had voted for the Democrats in the last election but had opted for the Liberal Democrats this time. “I have higher hopes now in the Liberal Democratic Party, especially in foreign affairs,” he said.

On declaring victory, Mr. Abe quickly promised to pass a massive spending bill, and said stimulating the faltering economy and ending deflation were his top priorities. He also promised help for the nation’s beleaguered export sector including more aggressive steps to drive down the yen and make Japanese products cheaper abroad.

There had been concerns that the hawkish Mr. Abe might try to fan Japanese anxieties over China’s growing strength, particularly that nation’s increasingly assertive claims to disputed islands in the East China Sea known as the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in Chinese. But Mr. Abe promised to move quickly to improve ties with China, Japan’s largest trading partner.

He also said he will mend ties with the United States, strained when the first Democratic prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, had clashed with Washington over an American air base on Okinawa. His party’s support of nuclear power will also likely spell the end of the Democrats’ plans to shut down most of the nation’s nuclear plants by the 2030s.

One reason for the size of the victory was the failure of new parties to convince voters that they were viable alternatives. One of the biggest losers was the Tomorrow Party of Japan, which was formed late last month to ride a wave of anti-nuclear sentiment following the Fukushima accident last year, but fizzled amid concerns that electrical shortages could hurt the already shrinking economy. The party had won just seven seats in early counting.

“We had no time for our message to be absorbed by the public,” said the party’s founder, Yukiko Kada, the governor of Shiga Prefecture.

The best performing new party was Japan Restoration, which was started in September by Osaka’s brash, 43-year-old mayor, Toru Hashimoto, with high hopes of winning younger voters with its promises of decisive leadership and creating American-style states with more autonomy from Tokyo. But his party seemed to lose some of its momentum after joining forces with the aging, ultranationalistic governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, whom many young voters view as a reactionary.

In interviews, voters said they ended up voting for the Liberal Democrats because they felt it was the only choice. Many analysts warned that meant public opinion could just as easily swing again against the Liberal Democrats if they pursued unpopular steps, such as trying to rewrite the nation’s antiwar constitution to allow a full-fledged military, something Mr. Abe has vowed to do.

“This is a landslide without a mandate,” said Satoshi Machidori, a political scientist at Kyoto University. “Mr. Abe shouldn’t view this as a carte blanche to do as he pleases.”

Recent polls have shown only limited support for Mr. Abe. In interviews, some voters said their biggest worry was not his hawkish stance but whether he would quit right away, as he did the last time he was prime minister, in 2007, complaining of an intestinal ailment soon after his party was defeated in upper house elections.

“Abe-san threw the job away once already,” said Yukako Sakamoto, 41, an office clerk who also voted in Kawagoe. “Will he just run away again if the going gets rough in the Senkaku?”

Analysts said another reason for the Liberal Democrats’ victory was their still potent vote-gathering machine in rural areas, which have a disproportionately larger number of parliamentary seats than urban areas like Tokyo due to inequalities in how Japan draws its electoral districts. To win those votes, the party vowed to restore spending on public works, which it has traditionally used to buy rural districts by showering them with construction jobs.

“The return to traditional L.D.P. public works spending doesn’t smell good,” said Kathy Matsui, an economist in Tokyo for Goldman Sachs. “But Abe gets good marks for his laserlike focus on getting the yen lower.”