Japanese Election update: Big Win for Koizumi and LDP

Koizumi’s LDP gets an outright majority in the Lower House. The party needed 269 and it looks like it got 296 – better than expected. It’s the first time the LDP has had a outright majority in 15 years. The party will try to urge Koizumi to stay in office for a year after his planned resignation in September of ’06, though he says he won’t.

Katsuya Okada, the head of the LDP’s main opposition party, the DPJ (Democratic Party of Japan), will step down from his position after failing to win a majority. Incidentally, Okada had vowed to bring troops home from Iraq if his party gained a majority.

About half of the LDP dissidents look like they'll survive.

The Nikkei site has some different numbers than Kyodo, but those numbers are displayed in a nice table showing the primary coalitions. What's a little odd is that in a country where you'd be hard pressed to find many people who would profess an interest in politics, the voter turnout is expected to have been up around 67%.

UPDATE: The blogosphere slowly awakes. Roger Simon, who return from Japan last week (and had some good photos here and elsewhere) says that Koizumi looked like a winner last week.