NAGATO, Yamaguchi Prefecture--Angered by an election poster, former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s supporters threw their support behind the incumbent mayor here and led him to rout a candidate backed by the ruling coalition parties and a former rival of Abe. 

Mayor Tatsuya Ehara was re-elected on Nov. 19, beating Yoshiko Nono, a former city government official supported by the Liberal Democratic Party and its junior coalition partner, Komeito.

That night, Yoshimasa Hayashi, a former foreign minister who had campaigned with Nono, stood alongside her and bowed in defeat.

“It is a great pity that we were not strong enough,” said Hayashi, whose family had been locked in a fierce political rivalry with Abe’s family based in Nagato.

Ehara, 60, garnered 9,974 votes against only 6,889 votes for Nono, his only challenger in the election.

Nono, also 60, conceded that she had not expected she would lose by such a large margin.

Both Ehara and Nono are LDP members.

LDP prefectural assembly members close to the former mayor who lost to Ehara in the previous election asked Nono to run.

At the urging of the prefectural assembly members, the LDP’s prefectural chapter endorsed Nono, who had just joined the party in August.

The decision sparked a backlash from Ehara’s supporters.

A senior official of the LDP’s prefectural chapter said that a poster featuring pictures of both Nono and Hayashi rubbed Abe’s supporters the wrong way because it catapulted Hayashi into the “face of the election” in Abe's former stronghold.

In particular, members of the women’s division in the local branch of the LDP’s prefectural chapter, who were staunch supporters of Abe, rallied against Nono.

Women shouted in triumph in Ehara’s election office on voting day after he secured his re-election.

“That election poster set a fire under us,” one of them said.

Nono’s campaign had counted on the well-known Hayashi to compensate for her lack of name recognition by emphasizing that she has the LDP’s official backing.

A longtime Upper House member elected from the Yamaguchi prefectural constituency, Hayashi won a Lower House seat in 2021, running from the Yamaguchi No. 3 district.

Abe’s constituency was the Yamaguchi No. 4 district, which covers the cities of Nagato and Shimonoseki.

The number of electoral districts in the prefecture will be cut from four to three from the next Lower House election, and both Nagato and Shimonoseki will become part of the new Yamaguchi No. 3 district.

The LDP headquarters picked Hayashi as chief of the party branch for the new Yamaguchi No. 3 district in June, although Shinji Yoshida, "Abe’s successor" who won a by-election for the Yamaguchi No. 4 district following Abe’s death last year, had also vied for the post.

Hayashi will run in the next Lower House election on the LDP ticket in the new Yamaguchi No. 3 district as chief of the local party branch. 

The senior official of the LDP’s prefectural chapter said the poster had indeed come as “a surprise.”

“Considering the feelings of Abe’s supporters here, I think more time was needed,” the official said, citing that Abe was assassinated only a year ago and Yoshida lost in a race to become the LDP candidate to represent Nagato in the next Lower House election.

Asked about the impact of the poster, Hayashi said on the night of Nov. 19, “We want to analyze it carefully.”

Ehara was on good terms with Abe. Ehara’s father was a senior official of the supporters’ group for Abe’s father, Shintaro, a former foreign minister.

During the years of the multiple-seat constituency system, Shintaro vied for the votes of LDP supporters against Hayashi’s father, Yoshiro.

Hayashi’s side, well aware of Abe’s popularity in his former constituency, planned to canvass support carefully after the redistricting.

Soon after Hayashi was selected as chief of the LDP branch for the new Yamaguchi No. 3 district, an aide said, “It would be better for us to lie low until the Lower House election without muscling in on (Abe’s) turf.”

While many supporters of Abe stood behind Ehara, LDP prefectural assembly members who supported Nono were also close to Abe.

“Hayashi was damaged this time because he got involved in a fight among Abe supporters,” said an official of the local branch of the LDP’s prefectural chapter.

After his re-election, Ehara expressed his intention to cooperate with Hayashi, saying, “I want to have a thorough conversation with him.”

However, a senior official of the supporters’ group for Ehara said, “In the next Lower House election, Hayashi should be prepared to miss out on the votes that Ehara won.”

(This article was written by Masayuki Shiraishi and Kazuya Omuro.)