TOKYO (Andrei Kuznetsov for RIA Novosti) - A new wave of the "collective unconscious" has swept Japan. In the last few days before the August 30 election to the lower house of Japan's parliament, a growing number of voters said they would vote for the largest opposition Democratic Party of Japan and against the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. As a result, the Democratic Party has won the election.
At first, the Democratic Party was fighting for a simple majority (over 241 seats), but by August 30 it was aiming for a qualified majority, or more than 320 seats. As a result, the party won 308 seats, while the Liberal Democratic Party has only 119 seats in the new parliament.
The LDP has been in power since its establishment in 1955 - with the exception of 10 months in 1993-1994, when a coalition of eight parties and groups ruled the country, without much success. Therefore, the defeat at this year's elections came as a very hard blow for it, signifying the demise of a once very powerful party.
DPJ leader Yukio Hatoyama will be elected prime minister at a special meeting of the parliament in the middle of September, ushering in a government that has promised to develop "a fraternal society founded on a policy of love" toward families, the unemployed and pensioners.
According to the DPJ, the first three months will be the most difficult for the new government. If it formulates a 2010 budget by the end of the year and ensures its approval in the parliament, this will serve as the foundation for a lengthy period of the DPJ rule in Japan after a 62-year pause.
The Liberal Democratic Party ineffectively played during the election campaign on the subject of "responsibility," and claimed that the DPJ has no experience of running the country and no funds to attain the proclaimed goals. The LDP also said that the growth of GDP has resumed, and the country has approached the end of the economic tunnel in the past months when the party was running the country.
However, the electorate refused to listen to these reasonable arguments, and the number of DPJ supporters grew fast. Meanwhile, the DPJ was relying hard on the populist promises to cut short bureaucrats, cancel high-speed toll road fees, introduce monthly allowances to families, and improve the social security system.
Hatoyama was bound to make these logical moves, because his party, unlike the LDP, has no experience in the sphere of foreign or domestic policy. He plans to call, preferably jointly with U.S. President Barack Obama, for a nuclear-free world at the UN General Assembly in late September.
This could be an instant hit - the world's first victim of nuclear bombing and the world's first country that dropped a nuclear bomb joining forces to call for a ban on nuclear weapons. However, a source at the U.S. State Department said on the condition of anonymity that they would not like to listen to fairytales during a summit meeting between the U.S. and the Japanese leaders.
The new government is likely to maintain allied relations with the United States, with a minor decrease in military operations abroad.
At the same time, top-ranking Japanese diplomats say that Hatoyama is unlikely to change anything in relations with Russia and with regard to the "Northern Territories." However, he may propose promoting economic and cultural relations with Russia.
Yukio Hatoyama has been a long-standing chairman of the Japan-Russia Society and his son studied in Moscow, where he is now working on plans to modernize the city's roads.
Nationalism will be forced to the background in the new government. Hatoyama has said that neither he, nor anyone in his cabinet, would visit Tokyo's Yasukuni shrine, which dates from the late 19th century and honors more than two million individuals who died fighting for Japan. This statement has provoked an outcry among the advocates of the Japanese war spirit and older-generation ñonservatives.
At the same time, the DPJ is short of leader-grade party members and Hatoyama will have to recruit LDP members to his cabinet. He has broadly hinted at the possibility when he said that the government needed about a hundred professionals, to be selected in the parliament.
Japanese business association Keidanren, traditionally a close and supportive ally of the LDP, is so far keeping neutrality. It has said it would support the political movement whose actions meet the country's national interests the most, thereby placing itself in a position to judge what is better for Japan.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
