438 file their candidacies for July 11 election
Kyodo News
As campaigning officially kicked off Thursday, the ruling Democratic Party of Japan hopes new Prime Minister Naoto Kan's popularity can spell success in the July 11 Upper House election and his goal of fiscal reconstruction, which entails a future sales tax hike, will not invite a voter backlash.
The poll will be the first full-fledged contest since the DPJ ousted the Liberal Democratic Party in last August's House of Representatives election, and also the first since Kan took office earlier this month and revived his party's popularity, which was plunging before the exit of his predecessor, Yukio Hatoyama.
Election boards nationwide reported 438 people filing their candidacies by early afternoon for the triennial poll, in which half of the upper chamber's 242 seats will be up for grabs with the fate of the DPJ-led ruling camp's majority at stake.
They include 187 candidates on the lists for the poll's proportional representation section submitted by all the 12 political parties and groups poised to vie for 48 seats. The remaining 251 will run in 47 prefecture-based constituencies, to which 73 seats in total are allocated.
"What helped the economy to flounder is a wrong economic policy. I promise to rebuild the economy and put Japan on a growth track," Kan, making his first stump speech for the race, said in front of more than 1,000 people in Osaka.
